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Towards an Erotics of Place

Filmmaker James-Murray-White shares his experience of some of the world’s desert places, and what the book Desert Quartet – an Erotic Landscape offers as a way into explorations of these places, of our sense of connectedness and self.

1,750 words: estimated reading time 7 minutes

“There is no separation between our bodies and the body of the earth.”
— Terry Tempest Williams, Desert Quartet – an Erotic Landscape

My partner Lucy is a child of the desert — indeed, we met in the Negev eleven years ago on a tour of Nabatean ruins (but that’s another story), and she’s recently returned from a top-up desert visit. Lucy has put me on to an extraordinary collection of writings and drawings: Desert Quartet – an Erotic Landscape, by Terry Tempest Williams and artist Mary Frank. A noted American nature writer, Williams — invoking the sensual lure and drama of the Colorado Plateau — dares to explore “what it might mean to make love to the land”. I’ve not been to the Colorado Desert, but reading this book took me back to the Joshua Tree, the Gobi, the Negev, and my waking dreams of the Sahara…

Desert Quartet - the cover of the book by Terry Tempest Williams and Mary Frank — Desert Quartet – an Erotic Landscape, by Terry Tempest Williams and Mary Frank

Desert Quartet is a short, beautifully illustrated hardback book, and probably quite rare: the sort of gem we stumble upon in a second-hand bookstore. Through it, we are taken on a wild journey of erotics — a quartet of them, in fact, connecting with earth, water, fire, and air. Terry Tempest Williams writes in a spare and intense word-by-word engagement with these elements, the place, space, and sensory feeling, and with herself: identifying, touching, and loving landscape and all within it.

It’s a book to read with a lover, or to take alone on a desert hike. If you are in the UK, Dungeness in Kent is our nearest thing to a desert — although not classified as such by the Met Office. It’s certainly a wonderfully wild place, and worth visiting to see the cottage and garden created by visionary artist and filmmaker Derek Jarman. If you’ve not been, do go. This book would be a useful companion: a wild guide to rewilding your soul and yourself.

Dungeness, southern England’s ‘shingle desert’
Photograph © James Murray-White sky-larking.co.uk

Desert Quartet — desert life

Rewilding is an opening up: allowing growth, listening and looking deeply — getting to the depths of the soil and loam. As Williams writes, “The wind becomes a wail, a proper lament for all that is hidden. Inhale. Exhale. This is the dreamtime of the desert, the beginning of poetry.” Rewilding is us as humans seeking genuine and open authenticity — and then connecting that with the outer wild!

Desert life is raw, tough, not for the fool-hardy. I identify with the bunch of British travellers and writers who have gone out and lived in, crossed, or tasted in some way the deserts of our world. T.E. Lawrence, famously, ‘became’ a desert dweller, deeply identifying with desert life and its peoples, and then was ultimately caught up in the military wargaming of the First World War (and came back to try to instil the desert culture within himself as a mystic hermit in the New Forest). Wilfred Thesiger crossed the ‘Empty Quarter’. And, most recently, Rory Stewart openly identifies with both these figures and this has shaped his ends politically. Deserts do have an extraordinary impact upon the human psyche, however we taste them, and it is not to be taken lightly. So Desert Quartet is in many ways a primer to know how to take both our psyche and our physicality into such a harsh environment.

My desert time has taken me to the Gobi in Mongolia, the Negev in Israel, and the Mohave in California, and still I crave more. The Gobi opened my eyes to the truly vast — the endless savanna and the liminal changes across a space: from the snowy high tops of the Altai mountain range, to the coarse sand and temperate climes of the middle regions. The Negev seems harsher: it is a six-month no-go region if you can’t stand relentless heat. In both these deserts I was drawn in by the peoples — by the nomads of Mongolia and by the Bedouin of the Negev, also nomadic but now politically forced to settle by political structures and states. It is crucial not to get sucked into romantic notions of indigeneity amongst surviving nomadic peoples: yes, their lineage is long and deep, and there is great wisdom, but there is the harsh reality of everyday life. Such groups can survive and sometimes thrive, but it is against the ever-creeping modernity of capitalism and catastrophic environmental damage: mining and river pollution in Mongolia, and military exclusions, creeping cities, and extremist land laws in Israel are examples that come instantly to my mind.

Mongolia
Photograph © James Murray-White sky-larking.co.uk

No ancient, passed-on knowledge equipped nomadic peoples in our current age to deal with the insipid hostility of modernity: theirs is a hard-edged living in present-day reality, wondering how their children will cope with feet in both camps. Most Bedouin and Mongol nomads I’ve met would laugh at the notion of us sensation-seeking Westerners going out to desert spaces to connect with land, to connect with the ‘erotics of nature’, and ultimately with ourselves. For desert-dwellers, this world is already within. Just as many nomads are forced — by the capitalist economy, by bitter harsh weather and changing climatic conditions, or by political threats or force — to move to the cities, imagine if the situation were reversed and we had to flee our urban territories… Like the wandering Mormons off to the brave new lands, we might find our call to desert lands before those external forces might prevail upon us.

My 2012 film Steadfast is an exploration of Bedouin life in the Negev, looking at the pressures these tribal peoples face, and how their interaction with the ‘new world’ cuts many ways.

A desert calling

Deserts are, in essence, the deepest place of our calling. If we are not of that place, the desert, we may — if we are lucky in our human lifetime — feel called there and experience the otherness of the place. Many have gone to deserts to meditate, to be humbled, and even to die. Terry Tempest Williams went there to feel into her most erotic landscape. I’ve been called to deserts to walk and look, and chiefly to meet nomads and desert dwellers. This is an amalgamation of the ecological parts of the entire spirit of a desert.

At Extinction Rebellion Rewilding (gathering on Facebook as the ‘rewilding’ wing of Extinction Rebellion), we have recommended an exercise explored in Mick Collin’s book The Visionary Spirit, of identifying yourself with a tree as a form of life-review and engagement with presence: imagining ‘your’ tree, feeling your roots, trunk and branches — anchored, flexible and spreading out — and noticing your sense of flourishing, connection and resilience. In a similar way, I recommend using Desert Quartet as a total mind/body guide to engagement with place. It maybe offers an opportunity to reflect upon place/self, the wild edges between these, and (if you choose, within a Buddhist dialectic) no self; and an example of how we might want to reflect and record that through words, art, and more.

Desert Quartet - showing a page from the book by Terry Tempest Williams and Mary Frank — ‘Desert Quartet – an Erotic Landscape’, by Terry Tempest Williams and artist Mary Frank

I’m just starting on another Terry Tempest Williams book, Red: Passion and Patience in the Desert, which switches into the politics of land use and land rights in American deserts: after the sensual, deep inner wild, out now into the boxing ring of human ecological scenarios and ego and squalling…

“I strike a match and light the shreds of kindling I have cut with my knife. I fan the incense toward me. The smoke rises, curls, coils around my face. It feels good to be in the desert again. Home — where I can pause, remain silent. There is nothing to explain.” — Terry Tempest Williams, Desert Quartet — an Erotic Landscape.

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Desert Quartet – an Erotic Landscape, by Terry Tempest Williams and Mary Frank, was published by Pantheon Books, New York (1995). You can read an extract here, and in a piece for High Country News on 3rd June 1991, Williams says “Let us get out and love the land. Let us be intimate. The most radical act we can commit is to live well. There is no defence against an open heart and a supple body in dialogue with wildness. Internal strength is an absorption of the external landscape. We are informed by beauty, raw and sensual. Through an Erotics of Place our sensitivity becomes our sensibility.” (Yellowstone: the Erotics of Place, High Country News, 3rd June 1991, page 16).

You can explore Dungeness, situated next to Romney Marsh in Kent and one of the largest expanses of shingle in Europe, at Unusual Places. And there is more to discover at Romney Marsh – the Fifth Continent. “It has been said that Dungeness is like Marmite, you either love it or hate it. The landscape certainly divides people – a broad, echoing flatness with the nuclear power stations on one side, the shingle dipping into the sea on the other and railway carriages turned into quaint and strange looking dwellings. The stark wild beauty and distinctive character of this shingle desert engenders feelings of awe, wonder and curiosity.”

The Visionary Spirit: Awakening to the Imaginal Realm in the Transformocene Age by Mick Collins is published by Permanent Publications, UK (2018). Mick talks about his previous book, The Unselfish Spirit, in this 2014 podcast and you can watch his recent talk at the Into The Wild Festival, Summer 2019, introduced by James.

Extinction Rebellion Rewilding is the Facebook group exploring how rewilding can also be seen as not only the regeneration of natural biodiversity but also as the respect and rediscovery of indigeny and balanced relationship within the diverse ecosystems of the earth. “All acts of rewilding are Rebellion.”

You can watch James’ film Steadfast, and more of his films, on Vimeo. And don’t forget to check out Finding Blake, the website for James’ most recent film project, reimagining William Blake for the 21st Century. In one of his previous ClimateCultures posts, “Summon the bravery!” Encounters at Small Earth, James describes taking part in the Small Earth conference in 2018, where psychotherapists, ecologists, economists, philosophical and spiritual thinkers gathered to address hope for future living within the ecosphere.

James Murray-White

A writer and filmmaker linking art forms to dialogue around climate issues, whose practice stretches back to theatre-making.
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Susan Holliday

A psychotherapist and writer committed to the rewilding of human nature, exploring the correlation between despoiling our natural world and the desolation of the human spirit
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An Invitation to Act: Letters to the Earth

Poet Clare Crossman was inspired to respond to a public call for Letters to the Earth and her poem is included in the publication — a book which offers “a spelling out that we are interconnected with nature.”

1,700 words: estimated reading time 7 minutes

Early in 2019 a call went out on social media, I think I saw it on Facebook. Culture was also proclaiming an emergency. They were looking for ‘letters to the Earth’ from writers all over the country, to be read out loud during an event linking the Globe Theatre to the streets, the protests — anywhere people were gathering during a one-day event in April, when it was planned that everything they had been sent would be read out loud by someone, somewhere for the Earth.

Letters to the Earth book design, showing swallow illustrations by Jackie Morris — Letters to the Earth
Swallow illustrations: Jackie Morris © 2019

I had recently written a poem in the form of a monologue about climate change. It had arisen on a dark winter’s night in 2018 when I found myself in deep discussion with a science journalist, a theatre director and filmmaker at an arts get-together. We were looking at the stars and wondering. It turned out we all had entirely different perspectives. Someone said they believed we were just part of a geological arc of years and that we were facing extinction. The Anthropocene was the Sixth Mass Extinction and it was as predictable as the cycles that had brought the Ice Age. It was a point in history, we as human beings had ruined the natural world and there wasn’t much that could be done about it.

The act of naming

It was such a starry night and we were outside in the dark looking up. This conversation stayed with me in the way certain experiences do if you are a poet. I think it lingered because the landscape of Cumbria and other, southern, landscapes formed my writing. I grew up in a profoundly rural place, close to a farm that still had a field called The Meadow that was left to go wild and filled with buttercups, clover, speedwell and eyebright in what I see now as a deeply held tradition for the dairy farmer who lived opposite us and spoke in Cumbrian dialect.

Earlier, I also was brought up by a countrywoman whose father had been a carter in the depths of undeveloped Kent where she lived on a farm. She knew the names of all the wildflowers I asked about. The rare, the common, the folk, alternative names and some of their herbal properties. I was always walking into stinging nettles, she always supplied a dock leaf. When hot, we sucked the honey out of the bottom of clover petals.

So I have a sense that the natural world was part of me and it is to my great advantage and by luck that I have a connection and can name these things. In the north, an occupation on a summer’s afternoon was to walk or go and swim in the wash pools of the beck at Mungrisdale. So, this is why I wrote the poem, The Night Toby Denied Climate Change, which found its way into Letters to the Earth: Writing to a Planet in Crisis. I was delighted and surprised when I received an e-mail asking for permission to publish it. I thought it would become part of the wind, which was good enough for me.

As Simon McBurney writes in his piece included in the book, The Act of Naming: “To be unable to name is to be cut off because we cannot read. If we cannot read, we cannot connect or orientate ourselves or know that story you, our earth is telling”. I am not going to write on this now but, needless to say, if you want to know the recent statistics on the numbers of children who never go into nature and don’t see it as part of them, look no further than Fiona Reynolds’ The Fight for Beauty: Our Path to a Better Future.

Firepit conversation

The Night Toby Denied Climate Change wasn’t the kind of poem I usually write. I wanted what I had to say to be carried on someone’s voice, so I wrote it as a monologue in the voice of someone who I imagine was sitting around a fire pit with Toby and others. I started my working life in theatre and still love its democratic openness of forms.

Letters to the Earth logo
Artist: Jackie Morris © 2019

The book of a hundred poems and prose pieces selected from all the letters they received is broad and lovely in scope. As it says on the flyleaf, “The book you are holding contains letters from all of us: parents and children; politicians and poets; actors and activists; songwriters and scientists. They are letters of Love, Loss, Hope and Action to a planet in crisis. They are the beginning of a new story. They are an invitation to act.”

There are some very august writers and thinkers in this book, as well as many young people. In Katie Skiffington’s letter, Procrastination, she begins every paragraph with the word ‘Sorry’, after beginning ‘Dear Future Generations’. Her whole letter is an apology describing all the things we did not do:

Sorry. We didn’t get there in time. We were late. Except we had time.
...
Sorry that instead of seeing trees as graceful homes for now extinct species, we view them as nothing but paper; money. Great big money-making machines.

There are also pieces which create new metaphors and stories for Earth. Peter Owen Jones redefines his relationship with the earth as milk which was given him. Mark Rylance creates a fairy story based on a canoeing excursion he has just made down the Colorado River where he sees cities and skyscrapers fall. There is Yoko Ono’s writing and of course Mary Oliver, Jay Griffiths, and Caroline Lucas. The poet Nick Drake and the novelist Lyndsay Clarke.

Letters to provoke

Even though they are many established famous names, these are all pieces of new writing balanced with each other in tone and ideas from many others and so Letters to the Earth should not be seen as a coffee table book. Oh no. It is a book full of a hundred very different thoughtful pieces which may be of use in teaching or inspiring writing and, of course, thought. The range of all reactions to climate change is there to provoke the reader and all emotions — despair, hope, loss as it says on the flyleaf. In his piece An Apology/A Prayer the playwright Steve Waters says:

OK, In our defence
By way of
Justification
The prospects for the
FOURTH INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION
The prospects for
POSTCAPITALISM
The prospects for
FULLY AUTOMATED LUXURY COMMUNISM
Looked, and on one of the good days still look 
Exciting

And perhaps we found ourselves so gripped by the narrative Of
GLOBALLY ACCELERATED GROWTH
Or the
INTEGRATION OF THE SOUTHERN ECONOMIES
Or the advent of
NANO-TECHNOLOGY

(I mean you have to realise some of us were born in a period when we could use the words
‘the future’
Say them:
‘the future’ 
Entirely without irony or dread)

There is wit, delight and sorrow in every page of this book. It forms a beginning to show what is happening in the world: a response, perhaps even a first base, or a spelling out that we are interconnected with nature. In a world where temperatures are rising, the ice is melting and mass extinction of many species has already happened.

Find out more

Letters to the Earth: Writing to a Planet in Crisis, with an introduction by Emma Thompson and edited by Anna Hope, Jo McInnes, Kay Michael and Grace Pengelly, is published by Harper Collins UK (2019). All royalties go towards ongoing creative campaigning for environmental justice.

The wider initiative which led to the book came about in the spring of 2019, when a small group of women came together around a kitchen table to talk. “We’d not even met before. But we had been profoundly shaken by the increasingly dire news of climate and ecological collapse, and inspired by the work of Extinction Rebellion and the Global Youth Strike in bringing that news to the forefront of the public conversation. In our working lives we are theatre makers and writers and we felt strongly that we wanted to find a way to facilitate a creative response to these times of emergency.” As well as Extinction Rebellion, and Global Climate Strike, Letters to the Earth was inspired by and works in sympathy with Culture Declares Emergency.

On the Letters to the Earth website you will find a range of resources, including short videos of readings of some of the letters, an open call to write your own letter, suggestions for local events, and further reading. As well as Clare’s poem, The Night Toby Denied Climate Change, the book also includes contributions from two other ClimateCultures members: social scientist Dr Stuart Capstick (Finding Dory) and poet Nick Drake (The Future).

You can read The Night Toby Denied Climate Change and other poems of Clare’s at her website. And do also explore the Waterlight Project, her collaboration with fellow ClimateCultures member James Murray-White and others on the natural and social history of the River Mel in Cambridgeshire. Clare recently wrote some poems for the jazz trio Red Stone about another river, the River Gelt in Cumbria. Entitled Green Shelter, it was premiered at Tullie House in Carlisle on November 30th 2019, with the poems, Red Stone’s music and an accompanying film. You can see a promo for the film, including one of Clare’s poems, Green Shelter.

The Fight for Beauty: Our Path to a Better Future by Fiona Reynolds is published by Bloomsbury (2017).

Artist and illustrator Jackie Morris — creator with Robert Macfarlane of The Lost Words: A Spell Book (published by Hamish Hamilton at Penguin UK, 2017) created the swallow logo for Letters to the Earth and Culture Declares Emergency. She has written about her experience with the book on her blog: About time: or, Letters to the Earth.

Clare Crossman

A poet with a background in theatre, collaborations with an illustrator and a songwriter, and practical and creative engagements with local landscapes and nature.
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The Last Snows

Writer Nick Hunt travelled to Scotland’s Cairngorms in search of a once permanent presence that’s becoming another marker of a new transience: enduring snows that serve as scraps of deep of time, now endangered on our warming island.

710 words: estimated reading time 3 minutes

Garbh Coire Mòr in the Cairngorms is home to two of Scotland’s longest-lying snow patches: Sphinx and Pinnacles (named after nearby climbing routes). They normally endure year-round in this remote, high corrie. But things are not normal any more. In recent years they have melted before the end of the summer, bellwethers of a wider change.

In the last week of September I went to find what was left of them.

Garbh Coire Mòr - Photographby Nick Hunt — Garbh Coire Mòr
Photograph: Nick Hunt © 2019

An Arctic outpost

After catching the sleeper train to Aviemore and walking for around ten miles up the rugged post-glacial valley of the Lairig Ghru, I arrived at the foot of Braeriach in the early afternoon. Cloud hung low over the mountain but in the hollow of Garbh Coire Mòr it lifted for a minute or two, just enough time to give me a glimpse of two pale eyes.

A tundra landscape - photograph by Nick Hunt — A tundra landscape
Photograph: Nick Hunt © 2019

As I approached, leaving the path to walk over a boggy weave of blaeberry, moss and reindeer lichen – the tundra landscape that turns the Cairngorms into an exclave of the Arctic – the shapes of the snow patches became more apparent. It was difficult to guess their size. The final climb was a scramble up wet, sliding scree.

Sphinx - photography: by Nick Hunt — Sphinx
Photography: Nick Hunt © 2019

First I went to Sphinx, the smaller, slightly higher patch. Up close its snow wasn’t smooth, or even particularly white, but blushed pink with the run-off of the mountain’s reddish soil and stained black with darker grime, hairy with pine needles. Its surface was pitted and eroded from ablating and refreezing. It hardly looked like snow at all but a lump of spoiled meat.

Pinnacles - photograph by Nick Hunt — Pinnacles
Photograph: Nick Hunt © 2019

Pinnacles was bigger, perhaps eighteen metres long and a metre tall, though underneath it had lifted off the rock and appeared to be almost floating. I’d brought my ice axe with the idea of attempting a traverse, but I didn’t think it would hold my weight. Besides, it seemed disrespectful.

I laid the axe on top for scale and simply sat for an hour or two in the snow’s company. I put my bottle underneath to catch its dripping water. I felt reluctant to leave its side, as if I was keeping company with a stranger, terminally ill. I didn’t want to leave it alone. But at last I had to.

'Critically endangered' - photograph by Nick Hunt — ‘Critically endangered’
Photograph: Nick Hunt © 2019

Endangered snows

When Sphinx first disappeared in 1933, the Scottish Mountaineering Club declared the event to be so unusual that it was ‘unlikely to happen again’. But it did: in 1953, 1959, 1996, 2003, 2006, 2017 and 2018.

In the words of Iain Cameron, a dedicated ‘snow patcher’ who studies these icy anomalies, Sphinx was ‘critically endangered’ in the week I went to find it. For a while it looked like 2019 would be the first time in recorded history that it had disappeared for three years in a row. But it has been lucky. Early October snow prolonged its lifespan slightly, and a recent heavier snowfall has buried it in white again. Against all odds, it looks safe for this winter. But, in the new normal of runaway global heating, no one knows what the coming years will bring.

Scraps of Deep Time - photograph by Nick Hun — Scraps of Deep Time
Photograph: Nick Hunt © 2019

It is easy to understand the appeal of these unlikely snows. They are not only scraps of winter but scraps of history, of deep time. Obvious symbols of endurance, of bloodyminded obstinacy, they are also thermometers that self-destruct as our island warms. When their last crystals have dripped away, the national thaw will be complete and Britain will be entirely free of snow in summer. Bare.

At last it started getting dim, so I turned back down the mountain. The smudged eyes watched me go as the heavy cloud drew in again. When I looked back from further down the slope they were gone.

Find out more

With thanks to Iain Cameron, who co-authored Cool Britannia with Adam Watson (Paragon Publishing, 2010) and who photographs, measures and writes about snows on Britain’s hills. Find him on Twitter at @theiaincameron.

Nick Hunt

A fiction and non-fiction writer and editor for the Dark Mountain network of writers, artists and thinkers who've stopped believing the stories our civilisation tells itself.
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Rising Tide: A Weekend with Extinction Rebellion

Artist Linda Gordon was invited to lead a land art workshop using natural materials at Extinction Rebellion’s Rising Tide Festival in North Devon. She describes an experience of co-operation and natural harmony: “In other words, a sane community.”

1,940 words: estimated reading time 8 minutes

The Rebel Rising, Rising Tide weekend — organised and hosted by Extinction Rebellion Southwest, at Tapeley Park, North Devon — was characterised by fun and relaxation, underpinned by some important and serious talks: some covering aspects of the gathering climate and ecological crisis we are facing; others giving guidance on how best to bring about change, and on the role of XR.

There was some great music throughout, both live and recorded — and a huge range of relaxing activities: family yoga, meditation, massage… And a number of craft workshops and nature-related activities, for example, forest school bushcraft, permaculture and nature and forest therapy.

A range of authoritative speakers were on hand to give expert talks, including Jozette Kimba of Stop Ecocide — an organisation committed to getting the law changed, and making large-scale destruction of our natural environment a crime. MEP Molly Scott Cato spoke about the Green Party and Green economics, and how this aimed to address social and economic inequalities around the world. Other talks and workshops covered practical information and strategies that the audience could, if they wished, put into action: for instance, ‘How to speak with the Media and present yourself as a spokesperson’.

A gathering place

I hadn’t the faintest idea what to expect, never having attended an XR event before, but as the weekend drew nearer, it slowly dawned on me that there was going to be A LOT of people, and A LOT would be going on.

I stepped out of the car high up in the grassy field of Tapeley Park and gazed out over the wide expanse of gentle green Devon fields, bordered with trees, and down to the quiet Torridge Estuary below. Soft blue sky, wisps of white cloud, warm breeze, sunshine.
 
Exploring and preparing for the workshop, pacing and fretting: ‘Where do I find more contrasting and varied materials? Shall I take people for a walk? How many will turn up? five or 55? What age groups? And does anybody really want to hear my memorised notes on ‘how trees support our lives’? Meanwhile, my friend and helper, Jann went off to a talk on fossil fuels and came back looking worried and concerned.

Of course, I knew perfectly well at the back of my mind that everything relating to the workshop would work out brilliantly, once I relinquished control — and of course, it did. Participants dived into making a beautiful mandala artwork and nobody needed to hear from the likes of me how to connect with the Earth!

Rising Tide - making the mandala. Photograph by Linda Gordon — Making the mandala
Photograph: Linda Gordon © 2019

Throughout the rest of the day, and all Sunday, people stopped by to take photos, or to add to the work with leaves, grasses, cones and flowers. The intention was to use the mandala as a gathering place for starting off the procession at the closing ceremony the next evening.

I relaxed in the peaceful atmosphere of congenial company, the spacious surroundings of Tapeley Park, and the mild, tranquil weather. At the Mandala art site faint scents of barbequed vegetables reached my nostrils. A few yards away, at the pop-up Green Library, a group of children sprawled on the grass under its awning, playing a board game. A few adults were relaxing in chairs, reading magazines, whilst another couple played at a small Subbuteo table.

A rising tide

On Sunday I took in a couple of talks. I listened to ‘Social Justice and the Green Movement’ by Dr Ed Atkins, from the University of Bristol, who spoke of the Green New Deal, with its aim of justice and fairness for all — that is, a complete restructuring and reform of our economic system, and urgent action to address the climate crisis we are all facing.

He gave some examples of appalling social and environmental abuses in other parts of the world, particularly relating to our society’s massive demand for sand in order to build our towns and cities — leading to very lucrative and often criminal sand extraction enterprises in faraway countries.

Closer to home, in the light of what we all know — that our economy is driven by the richest sector of society — he spoke of the need to keep social discussion going: to protect the vulnerable, to respect workers’ rights and the right to work. I very much liked that on inviting questions at the end of his talk, he was also able to give people helpful tips on their individual local or family concerns.

I must have been in a geological mood that day, for the second talk I chose was titled ‘Resource Exploitation and General Climate Q&A’ by Professor Jon Blundy, from the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Bristol. He talked of the role of earth scientists in addressing and resolving current climate and environmental problems.

Professor Blundy, an expert in the processes of magma beneath the earth’s crust, began by explaining the creation of minerals in the magma, then went on to discuss the unfettered extraction of copper, iron, coal and rare earths by unscrupulous mining companies in various countries. He gave examples of the environmental damage and human suffering caused by such activities.

He also explained the vital importance of copper as a conductor in electrical systems and how it has the potential for massively reducing carbon emissions. Unfortunately, when it comes to extracting materials of great value for whatever reason, an increase in scale can cause devastation to local populations around the mining areas and add to the already known global effects of climate change.

I must admit, I was previously fairly ignorant of much of what I heard from these two speakers, and the distressing implications of it all, but now I am glad that I am more aware of it.

Stop Ecocide Photograph by Linda Gordon — Stop Ecocide
Photograph: Linda Gordon © 2019

Their observations and information struck me of great importance to life as we know it, drawing our attention to social and environmental suffering and injustices around the world; in encouraging others to take action on some of these issues (for instance, speaking at XR events), and in pointing the way towards possible solutions to some of the problems. And certainly we are going to need to make radical changes in our economic structures and industrial practices if we are going to avert what looks like rapidly approaching disaster for many species, including our own.

However, I doubt that science alone, although a wonderful tool, will necessarily resolve all our social and ecological ills. It all depends upon how the science is used. My current personal view is that time is indeed running out. Unless we humans can wake up fast to the realisation that life is all one, and we are all interdependent — then things don’t look too good.

A sane community

Later, I had a good look around the area, at the many stalls and signs of earlier activity. I wandered among the people quietly relaxing on the grass in the Sunday afternoon sunshine. And I spent some time in the huge marquee enjoying music and singing by the Southwest based female trio, Boudicca’s Child.

Back at the Mandala, where my workshop had been held, and which by now had accumulated further additions of flowers and woodland materials, I met with the four people who would be leading the Closing Ceremony. They represented the elements Earth, Air, Fire and Water. Instead of gathering everyone together around the mandala as originally planned, they decided to prepare themselves around it, with a quiet ‘smudging’ ritual. Smudging is a method of purifying and cleansing one’s energy with smouldering sage smoke, practised by some North American Indian tribes and also by some other cultures. I believe sage smoke has been found by science to have beneficial effects on our stress levels. It certainly has a very pleasant scent!

Rising tide - gathering with the oak. Photograph by Linda Gordon — Gathering with the oak
Photograph: Linda Gordon © 2019

Shortly before 5pm people from all over the Park gathered together in the high open field, ready to walk in procession to an area of woodland — to an ancient oak tree, reputed to be 1,000 years old, where the ceremony was to be held.

Perhaps the most moving part of the festival for me, was walking with several hundred others through the trees, slowly and in silence (apart from a single repeating drumbeat) — with the late afternoon sunlight dancing off the leafy canopy and shining through the soft colours of the XR flags.

Rising Tide of XR flags. Photograph: Linda Gordon — Rising Tide of XR flags
Photograph: Linda Gordon © 2019

An uninvited thought flitted through my mind: ‘All this is what we stand to lose’.

Then followed the solemn moment, around the ancient oak, when we all pledged to love and care for the Earth to the very best of our ability.

A slow quiet walk back to the place where we had started, and then I was back again to the mandala, to begin the process of clearing everything away. It was necessary to leave the site as we had found it, as Tapeley Park would be open to the general public the following morning. I returned the woodland material to the woods, and someone took the bunch of flowers she had contributed, and went to place them under the ancient oak tree.

People were beginning to leave now, to catch trains and buses or drive long distances home. But many stayed on to enjoy a Great Feast and music, which brought the Rising Tide Festival to a close.

Being tired and a little overwhelmed with new thoughts and experiences, I didn’t stay for this. However, I did take a large bag of tin cans home to recycle!

This was a successful and very well organised event, run on mutual goodwill, with volunteers working on everything from cooking, manning the carpark and the forest of tents, running the information post and the sound system, organising the clearing up and dismantling stuff at the end, the laying on of buses to meet trains from Barnstaple station, to the massive amount of background organisation that must have been needed beforehand.

I felt a comfortable and mutually supportive balance between the many relaxing, earth-related activities and the serious nature of the talks and educational workshops. Both are important, I think, in strengthening the XR movement in its purpose as a protest movement committed to compelling governments to act effectively on climate and ecological turmoil. Indeed, one of the workshops offered was on staying calm, centred and connected with oneself and others, at XR Actions.

Mandala XR Photograph by Linda Gordon — Mandala XR
Photograph: Linda Gordon © 2019

I can’t speak for others, but it seemed to me the atmosphere throughout the weekend was one of co-operation and trust, and a natural harmony with the immediate surroundings — in other words, a sane community. I was pleased to be one of this large number of people, drawn together largely by sadness at the state of our world, and a willingness to put things right and act in whatever non-violent way required.

Find out more

The Rising Tide Festival was held from 6th to 8th September at Tapeley Park, North Devon, and was organised and hosted by Extinction Rebellion Southwest. You can find information on the local XR group at xrfrome.org

Stop Ecocide is run by Ecological Defence Integrity (EDI), a small UK non-profit founded by the late Polly Higgins with a team of international criminal lawyers, diplomats and evidence experts working to advance a law of ecocide at the International Criminal Court.

Linda Gordon

An environmental artist making temporary works in the landscape as a way of re-connecting with life’s endless processes and essential unity and sharing this with others.
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Directing The Children

Climate change dramatist Julia Marques looks to her recent experience directing a play about environmental crisis to ask how community and other positive features of amateur dramatics groups might offer us routes into addressing the climate emergency itself.

2,060 words: estimated reading time 8 minutes

“We need a director for our spring production. Julia, why don’t you direct an environmental play?”

And, as quickly as that, I was in charge of the next production of my local amateur dramatics group, the Beaufort Players in Ealing, West London.

I’m not sure I fully understood the task at hand when I accepted the job, as I have only ever directed one other production (which was not a full-length play) in a previous amateur arts society. It turns out that directing requires high levels of multi-tasking, including the ability to create posters, choose set colours, help source props, secure a sound and lighting team, write a piece for the programme and ensure your cast have adequate costumes and makeup. This is in addition to the stereotypical, but fairly accurate, job of telling actors where to go and how to deliver lines on stage.

Building community

I found the experience thrilling, stressful and rewarding in equal measure. You have the power and the responsibility to shape the play in whatever way you want, to interpret it how you see fit and to focus on what you want the audience to get from it. But, as the famous quotation says, “with great power comes great responsibility”, and directing is no exception. Everything is riding on your leadership and the decisions you make — the buck stops with you. However, it is also thrilling to have a whole team of people standing by you every step of the way, and I wholeheartedly believe that this is what amateur theatre groups do best — community. I have come to the realisation through this process of directing that I do truly think that amateur dramatics societies could be used as a model for community-building that could indeed help with the environmental situation we find ourselves in today.

Play - showing Hazel & Robin. Photograph byThomas Cobb — Hazel: “Robin makes wine. Elderberry. Gooseberry. If he offers you the parsnip it means he wants to get you drunk, it’s absolute filth.”
Photograph: Thomas Cobb © 2019

A sense of community is a glorious thing; you feel supported and safe. You have people you can talk to (in this case, about where to find fake blood and whether we can emulate a flood on stage or not), people who share your sense of purpose and are with you till the bitter end! They share your vision and work with you to make it a reality — simply wonderful. Can you imagine if we used this dynamic to work towards a more Earth-centred way of living where we all supported each other through the transition and reached our goals together? What would that world look like?

Let’s look at some of the main elements of a local am dram group and how these could possibly form a community model for greater ecological sensibility.

‘The play’s the thing’

Common purpose — this is not a new idea, most societies are exactly that, a group of people with a shared interest. It’s what you do with this that counts. In an am dram group, you are a team and everyone pitches in and does a bit of everything. Very often, being in a play means not only acting but helping with the set, props, costume, hair and make-up, front of house, selling programmes and drinks, lighting, sound, prompting, directing, producing, designing and general moral support. I think the support offered in this sort of situation is invaluable. I have heard it said that members of amateur groups are often more dedicated than those in professional companies. This may be surprising as everyone is a volunteer — no one is getting paid. Perhaps this flexibility and willingness to help with whatever needs doing is the key. People are not stuck doing one job, they are actively encouraged to do as many as they can! This sense of freedom and the responsibility granted to people is empowering, and maybe that’s what we need for more environmental action. You are involved, empowered, active and purposeful. When people feel these sentiments then things really get moving.

There is a committee that meets regularly to discuss how the group is doing, made up of a chairperson, treasurer, secretary and some ordinary members. Tasks are divided up and reported on, productions discussed and minutes taken. Leadership is still needed but the group is carried by its members.

Small is beautiful — there are many am dram groups of varying sizes, but I think there is probably an optimal size for everyone to feel included in the group and to feel as though they are familiar enough with others in the group to feel comfortable there.

We work towards a production three times a year. Having an end goal motivates people, spurs them into action. You can’t underestimate that sense of achievement when the curtain opens and a fully-formed show spreads its wings to take flight. The thought, “I was part of making this happen”, is a powerful one.

In a previous post for ClimateCultures, I discussed the idea that theatre can provide us a ‘space for thought’. As part of an acting group, you have time together and time apart. This affords you both space to think and space to act. Previously, I had only focused on the audience members being afforded the space to think within the performance but this is true of those involved in the performance too. Let’s take the actor; they are given a script (much of the time) and direction but then they must also go and learn their lines by themselves and practise the actions they have rehearsed. Space to think individually and space to act communally. This space to think is important both for the audience and the cast and crew.

Could we combine these elements — common purpose, sense of inclusivity, familiarity, and working towards an end goal, being given responsibility and tasks to do, and creating both a communal and individual space for thought and action — to form enviro-action groups to increase our ecological connections?

Moving beyond business as usual

Back to the play. The one I finally settled on is The Children by Lucy Kirkwood. It was published and first performed in 2016 at the Royal Court Theatre in London. It revolves around three retired nuclear engineers who helped set up a plant on the east coast of England which has been damaged by a tidal wave before the play begins. Two of the characters are a married couple and the third is an old friend and colleague who appears unannounced at the start of the play. The reason she has come is not revealed until the middle, and I will not spoil it for those of you who wish to read or see it, but suffice it to say that she offers them a life-defining decision to change their ways or simply continue as before (‘business as usual’, I believe is the phrase).

HAZEL: How can anybody consciously moving towards death, I mean by their own design, possibly be happy?

Showing the play poster for Beaufort Players Present The Children — Beaufort Players Present …
Poster design: Brigite Marques © 2019

This obviously echoes recent global events, and not only climate-change related ones. This is fairly insightful of Lucy Kirkwood, as she started writing the play years before it was published. It also really brings us face to face with the idea of generational responsibility, and asks us if we have the ability to consider future generations while making decisions today. This resonates with indigenous practices in which, as researcher Liz Hosken says, “indigenous leaders are also accountable to past, present and future generations”. This is an extremely difficult concept for many of us who are not part of an indigenous group to get our heads around, as we are such short-term thinkers usually. Considering anything more than simply one generation into the future is somewhat mind-blowing; what will that world even look like? We have no way of knowing for sure, but at least we can play our part in ensuring that it is a little better because we made it so.

ROSE: It’s a good thing though, isn’t it?
ROBIN: What?
ROSE: Well. Learning to live with less.
ROBIN: Well you might have to.

The opinions flowing from the audience reflected my own feelings for the play — it’s a beautiful mixture of laughter, tears, playfulness and significance. Each section is thought-provoking in its own way. The choices the characters have to make are ones we ourselves are also being faced with. The play’s overall theme for me is how you value your life and the lives of others and what you are willing to sacrifice for them; what does selflessness really mean? Woven into this, Kirkwood adds inter-generational decision-making, guilt and responsibility, all contained within the four walls of the cottage kitchen and the three corners of a love triangle!

Play - showing Robin, Hazel & Rose. Photograph byThomas Cobb — Robin: “Our age, you have to show no fear to Death, it’s like bulls, you can’t run away or they’ll charge”
Photograph: Thomas Cobb © 2019

I think it would be almost impossible at this stage not to mention Extinction Rebellion. The group — eco-activists using civil disobedience and direct action — nearly reached their goal of two weeks of disruption in London earlier this year. Their actions started shortly after we had finished our play, which was unplanned I might add! Perhaps this is a new type of community that is forming to create environmental awareness and action. They certainly made an impact and managed to disrupt some of the central parts of the city.

ROSE: I do understand now, that for the world to you know completely fall apart, that we can’t have everything we want just because we want it.

Another model of community-based action is being enacted through the Transition Towns movement. As Liz Hosken says, “social movements such as Transition Towns in the industrialised countries are the beginning of the recognition of our need to reconnect with place in order to find identity, well-being and to learn once again how to live with ecological integrity, in compliance with the laws which inherently govern our lives”. In my local borough of Ealing, our Transition group has influenced the council to declare a Climate Emergency — before the UK parliament did so. Transition groups are community-led and really do work at the local level to inspire members to move towards an environmentally-focused way of being that is beneficial to all.

ROSE: You have the power to … you have a power. You have power.

My own vision is to have more people feel they are part of something, even if that is only a gardening group or a clean air petition: to feel as though they have a community. This is what the Beaufort Players have given me, and it really does help you feel happier and more purposeful, which is what we need when it comes to the environment. There is so much doom and gloom and we must move beyond that if we are to act with passion rather than stagnate in fear.

Just as with the characters on a stage, we must find our part to play in the ensemble of life.

Find out more

Lucy Kirkwood’s play The Children is published by Nick Hern Books (2016).

You can read Julia’s previous post for ClimateCultures, Space for Thought, where she reflects on her research at that time for an MA in Climate Change: Culture, History, Society, and the role that theatre can play in opening up space for us to take in what climate change means for us.

Liz Hosken’s Reflections on an Inter-cultural Journey into Earth Jurisprudence is published in Exploring Wild Law: The Philosophy of Earth Jurisprudence (edited by Peter Burden, 2011: Wakefield Press).

You can read more about Transition Towns — and find transition groups and activities nearest to you — at Transition Network.

Extinction Rebellion has many local groups and resources on its site, and Culture Declares Emergency lists its signatories, including Royal Court Theatre — where The Children was first performed — and many other theatre and other cultural organisations. Royal Court’s Executive Producer Lucy Davies is also a ClimateCultures Member and her post, Artists’ Climate Lab, describes a special week of creative activities she and others devised for artists working in London’s leading theatres.

Julia Marques

A climate change dramatist, activist and communicator specialising in social and cultural aspects of climate change who has worked in the nonprofit and media sector.
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