Articles

RELIGION/SECULARISM – FAITH/SCIENCE 

‘There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy’

 

Many people today continue to find a sense of the sacred and transcendent through devotion to their religion. However, most only seek this out at services on their holy days and religious festivals.  During the rest of the week they tend to accommodate themselves to the materialistic values of the secular/consumer world – a world which does not recognise or even acknowledge the sacred or transcendent.

The opinions of those without religious beliefs are derived almost entirely from the physical world ie. all life, physical and mental, can be reduced to ongoing reactions of chemicals and molecules, that can be explained by an evolutionary philosophy/theory, that argues that life emerged from primaeval mud billions of years ago, and by a process of natural selection, gave rise to myriad life forms, with man as the only self-conscious, self-determining, brain-developed animal, acting alone to guide the whole process on it’s progressive march into the future.

The contrast between these views could not be more distinct.  The secularist dismisses the beliefs of the religious as outdated superstitions, and prayer as an exercise by fearful and emotionally dependent people, who have created an imaginary all-powerful friend who, they believe can help them through life and intervene on their behalf.

Both these views seem to me not just inadequate, but in many ways a denial of the underlying nature of reality, as revealed by physicists.

Consider:-  under an electron microscope, the chair you are sitting in is not solid:

It is a mass of photonic and sonic energies resonating on a particular frequency.  It seems solid because our own bodies are resonating on the same frequency in three physical dimensions.  Imagine a ‘being’ resonating on other, perhaps higher frequencies, in further dimensions.  (Scientists suggest there may be at least eleven dimensions). Such a being might not see ours as solid at all – but view us as creatures bound by these dimensions, trying to control them by measuring their length, depth, height, weight, space and time.  Such a being might view us as primitive, because the majority were living as if the three dimensions they were experiencing, made up the whole of their reality.  It would be like a leaf on a tree saying ‘I photosynthesise – therefore I am’ – ignoring the branches, trunk and roots, let alone the water-bearing nutrients being drawn up from the ground (of being).

In the sub-atomic world of the quantum, a photon (particle/flow of light) can be everywhere and at once ie. imminent and omnipresent.  It is timeless.  The founders of most of the great religions were, what we might describe as ‘earthy’ mystics, (ie living in three dimensions but aware of others). Realising the inadequacy of language, they tried to teach/enlighten their followers about the true nature of reality by the use of parables etc.

Today, most ignore/dismiss or have forgotten the greater part of who they really are (the common trunk/roots/ground of being) Thus the religious believe, and are reassured by those beliefs, of attaining a deeper, harmonious state after death.  In contrast, the secular-materialist maintains his unbelief in anything transcendent and spiritual, even denying the implications of archetypal and symbolic experience, let alone a commonality of inherited myths handed down by every race and culture throughout history.  In refusing even to entertain the possibility of spirituality and transcendence, the secularist makes an idol of his own brain, which he sees as the only rational way for a superior animal, alone in a soul– less universe, to survive.  In the developed world this anthropocentric and ego-centric view of man is increasingly prevalent.  However, splitting the objectifying brain from deeper consciousness can create a schizoid state – divorcing the conscious surface from the deeper levels of being that speak to the whole human organism.  The greater the division and denial, the deeper the sense of dis-ease, and the greater the loneliness.

In the last thirty years or so, this superficial state of consciousness has been exacerbated by a growing addiction to the blizzard of information transmitted and received through the world wide web – e-mails, twitter, tweets etc in which people feel obliged to keep up to speed with events and share their life experiences.

Similarly, another result of this explosion of information is the inevitable need for specialisation (the study of a particular fan of leaves on a twig) ie consciousness becomes compressed – particularly when a subject is being programmed for public consumption;  then the relationship between the twig and its branch and trunk, is all but lost because of time constraint.  As Goethe pointed out ‘they who cannot draw on three thousand years are living from hand to mouth’ – but to draw on those ‘three thousand years’, we are obliged to slow down, find space, and rest in the timeless depths if we are to make sense of the world and ourselves.

There are further implications for this growing gulf between creative being, and faith in technological development, whose quickening currents are carrying us further and further away from the past, and indeed, from a more holistic understanding of the present;  for the very drive for technological power over nature is driven by greed, and  is enslaving and destroying the very eco-systems of which humankind is a part, wholly reliant on, and which dance to different tempos.

How then to connect the time-bound physical creation and our obsession with measuring and controlling it, with the eternal, ever-creative, timeless world of those other dimensions that hold ours together?

I wish that everyone (particularly the religious) would read the Bible or the Koran etc, and every time the word God is mentioned, substitute the word ‘Love’.  It would be a salutary exercise, particularly reading the Old Testament.  Eg how do you square God/Love saying to Moses ‘Kill every Amalekite, man woman and child let there be none left’ with Jesus’s teaching about God/Love in the New Testament?  (Clearly, this was a political/cultural decision by Moses for a very good reason, possibly because sexual disease was known to be rampant amongst that tribe. At that time, the men did the fighting, and if they won the battle, seized all the enemies’ women, to build up their numbers.  Strikingly, Moses orders the opposite.)

Jesus said – ‘The Kingdom is within you’.  God is Light /Love/Spirit – ergo Love equals Light equals Spirit  equals God.  The timeless, quantum Kingdom that has brought our three physical dimensions together in time, resonates throughout it in our ground of being, seeking to embrace us, and assure us that we are not alone, and calling us back into harmony.  So why do we not respond?  Why do we find it so difficult?

The opposite of Love is not hate – it is fear.  Likewise, the opposite of faith is not unbelief – it is fear.

We cling to riches and status because we are afraid, not just of final oblivion, but of our own vulnerability, and build physical and intellectual defences to protect ourselves.  Just as people from religious factions subscribe to defined codes of dogmas and doctrines, so also people with a secular, materialistic outlook subscribe to various political, educational and economic orthodoxes, which they believe will assist future human evolution.  All are attempting to build and defend their own empires of belief.

In doing so, they ignore a great universal law – that of differentiation.  ie nothing remains the same – at the quantum level, everything is dancing and changing the structure and nature of our three physical dimensions. Thus,  no two snowflakes, grains of sand or even clones at a deep level, have ever been the same or can ever remain the same, and all human attempts to build rigid, uniform empires, shaped according to religious or secular doctrines, are doomed to failure.  The more centralised the control, the more lignified they become, and the more quickly they will collapse as differentiation undermines them.  (A repeat of the archetype of the Tower of Babel). ‘It is the spirit that gives life to the flesh’ – not the reverse.

But the central and vital point I am trying to make is about the nature of time, and the space from which life emerges.

THE IDOL OF TIME

Why is it that we measure out

Our lives against our ticking clocks

The seasons   come, the seasons go

And play upon the weathering rocks

The light- years of the fleeing stars

The spectrum of their radiation

We think reveals the Bang and Birth

The linear path of our creation

  

The Greenwich line,  atomic clock

Our yardsticks measuring the flow

Of myriads strokes on one small string

A fixed point on the mowing bow

Yet time to flea or elephant

Bird or fish or wayside flower

Is not a metronomic beat

Of sixty seconds to the hour

We honour calculating brains

Objectifying time and motion

Vivisecting time and matter

Schizoid in their cold devotion

Yet on our own event horizon

Immeasurable round each Black Hole

Exuding into new dimensions,

Timeless to the inner soul

Sing quanta strings of dancing life

Elysian fields of sound and light

Winging in and out of matter –

Without a measurement  in sight

 

Time only exists for the observer of it, because physics shows us that when we try and capture a sub-atomic particle (ie bring it into time) it not only loses its context (is it a particle or a wave?) it defies measurement, and escapes the limits of our brain’s capacity to understand it.

The secularist sees time as billions of years of evolving history.  The religious/creationist  sees something much more abbreviated.  Both are wrong – because they are defining themselves, and the cosmos, by their physical experience of it – the former by a theoretical time-bound philosophy of amoeba to man, and the latter, by a crude, fundamentalist interpretation of their holy book.

Yet, if we return to the statement made earlier – ‘I photosynthesise therefore I am’ – or ‘my Holy Book tells me I was created a few thousand years ago’ – both are looking at our time-bound, three dimensions of existence, and ignoring the timeless quantum level that hold physical existence together ie we live in time, but are created out of sub-atomic, timeless reality. Just as the medieval church placed the earth at the centre of the universe, and taught that everything revolved around our planet, so we today have artificially constructed a time-bound, three dimensional world, with ourselves at the centre, and a ‘theory’ (evolution) to re-inforce our semi-schizoid interpretation of reality.

At one point perhaps there was no veil, between our three physical dimensions and the others – no wardrobe door into Narnia.  The Spirit/Love/Light was one seamless creation breathing through the physical and holding all the myriad life forms in harmonious tension.  For whatever cosmic, cataclysmic reason (in the Christian tradition, the three dimensions of our planet and the physical universe are traumatised – exiled, out of sync with the timeless reality through there) a heavy veil now hangs between the two realities, (the wardrobe door is firmly closed), and lonely man, knowing himself to be naked and ashamed, now tries to clothe himself, re-write his own history and deeper experience of reality, ignoring the witness of the great spiritual teachers, archetypes and symbols buried in his collective unconscious.

This schizoid attempt to be independent from the great quantum dance operating in the spiritual ground of being is doomed to failure.  Only by tearing down the veil, bursting open the Narnian wardrobe door, can a healing harmonious presence be restored.  That eternal Kingdom within can only be entered by children. Thus, if we really want to enter it as adults, we have to let go everything, – our fear, pride, intellectual beliefs and creeds, and learn to trust the creating Spirit of Love reaching out to us through our ground of being. We are far bigger and deeper than we realise.

‘Seek the truth and the truth shall set you free’.  The way is open again.  Before Christians were called Christians, and that faith became codified into a religion set firmly in time, they were said to be ‘in the way’ ie living in the assurance of that timeless flow of creative, healing Love welling up from their ground of being.

 

 

 

Jeremy Bell

Jan. 2014

 

FOOD SCARCITY

30 April 2013

I saw with open eyes singing birds sweet

Sold in the shops for people to eat

Sold in the shops of stupidity street

 

I saw in vision the worm in the wheat

And in the shops nothing for people to eat

Nothing for sale in stupidity street

 

(by Ralph Hodgson)

Most have all but forgotten what shopping was like before the advent of supermarkets.  Now we expect the shelves to be groaning with every variety of food imaginable, much presented to us which has been grown on the other side of the world, and imported into theUK.  We expect this variety all year round – not just to be available in season.

We throw about 30% of it away, while each year 2 million people in the world die from malnutrition; we have an epidemic of obesity while two to three food banks are being opened every week to feed the poor.

Every time a customer buys a packet of cornflakes, the cashier’s computer connects to the vast distribution depots and registers the transaction, so that the shelves can be replenished.  If there is an electricity cut, supermarkets close their doors to maintain the integrity of their vulnerable computer systems.

Unlike our ancestors, or even the elderly alive today, we expect food security, and hardly consider it to be a problem compared to all the other pressing issues in our obsession with economic growth.

Before the second World War, food production was much more localised.  Local growers and farmers supplied local abbatoirs, markets and shops.  Today, many of the food chains are so international and convoluted, that sourcing the product, let alone the ingredients, grows evermore difficult and the supply chains evermore extensive.

Compared to 1925, when there were approximately 2 billion people on the planet, we in the so-called developed world eat like kings.  Naturally, those in the developing world aspire to the sort of food security and diet that we have grown used to.  But there are now over 7 billion of us.  Can the corporate, capitalist economic model continue to deliver – dependent as it is on oil for transport, plastics, fertilisers etc?

Is it possible to continue to grow the amount of barley, wheat and maize needed, when 55% of what is grown is used to fatten livestock – and the climate is changing rapidly.  Yes it is changing, and is effecting food security.

When next you engage with a climate change denier, ask them to do the following.

Firstly – take a physical map of the world printed circa 1850, and compare it to one printed circa 2000.  Compare the amount of forest and jungle (the lungs of the planet) and the amount of desert.  In 1880,Ethiopiafor instance was about 78% forested: it is now about 11%.  Compare also the amount of land now covered in concrete.  Since 2002, for the first time in human history, more people on the planet now live in expanding cities, and thus rely on being fed from the diminishing areas of fertile land around them.

Secondly – point out that if every African, Indian, Chinese and South American were to enjoy the sort of lifestyle and diet that we do in the UK, we would need the resources of three planet earths – today!

Thirdly – encourage them to watch films such as ‘The Age of Stupid’, ‘The end of the Line’, and in particular a film backed by the Co-op called ‘Chasing Ice’.  It nearly brought me to tears.

Ah, I hear some of these climate change deniers already saying ‘there have always been warming and cooling periods throughout the earth’s history, and the earth’s overall temperature has not increased for 16 years’.  Indeed, there have always been natural climate changes – but if you separate sea temperature from land temperature, you will see that land temperature is still rising (.3 degrees centigrade in the last 10 years across the whole globe) 2 degrees C in China in the past 50 years, and 3 degrees C in the Antarctic peninsula where the icecap is rapidly melting ditto the Arctic.  Compared to pre-industrial times, carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere have nearly doubled.  ie We are changing the ratio of gases all plant and animal life breathes.

The result is that extreme weather is becoming much more common.  Peak rainfall rates in South East Asia have doubled over 30 years, and in theUKwe have seen a rise in the number of heavy, localised showers as cumulus clouds become bigger.  Last year was the second wettest on record, and saw one of the longest periods of drought.  In theUSAit was the warmest year on record, and inRussia, the second warmest – which devastated crops and caused huge bush fires.  DittoAustralia.

Climate change equals extreme weather – floods – drought – increased wind speeds – soil erosion and polluted water.

The Chinese are so concerned about the effects of their rapidly accelerating rate of development and urbanisation, that they are buying up vast areas of agricultural land in places likeSouthern Sudanto feed their population.  Questions were asked recently about why, in a recent mapping exercise in one area ofChina, over a thousand rivers and streams were not recorded.  They no longer existed – and many other Chinese Waterways, as well as ground water sources, are now so polluted by industrial waste that they are becoming undrinkable, and are contaminating crops.

When I talk to some climate change deniers they often say ‘it won’t happen in my lifetime’, and I want to shout ‘it is happening – it is starting to effect you and me now – and doesn’t even your tabloid mindset care about your own children and grandchildren?’

Are you not concerned about the plummeting decline in bees and moths – the chief pollinaters of our crops, without whose industry we would see mass global starvation?

Are you not concerned about the rapid decline in many species of birds?

Are you not concerned about the plummeting decline in global fish stocks, because we continue to allow huge industrial trawlers with mile long, nylon nets to plough the ocean floors, hoovering up fish, and destroying vital coral reefs, and the feeding and breeding grounds of fish?

Yet the EU still has a policy of allowing fishermen to jettison all fish under a certain size.  ie they are thrown back overboard – dead.  Eg bass only start to breed when they are about 42 cms long, yet commercial fishermen are allowed to catch them at 36 cms long.  Ditto cod.  It is difficult to conceive of a more insane policy.

A few politicians raise concerns.  Perhaps a 2 year moratorium on neonicotinoid pesticides might be a good thing to see if bee numbers recover?  (Research over 5 years has shown that these pesticides are very likely to be the cause of the near 80% decline in bee numbers as well as destroying moths and possibly birds).  Should we not do something about the bio side that is current fishing policy?  Why are we importing so much food which could be grown in theUKand so many of our farmers are giving up the land while so many young people find it impossible to enter the farming industry?  But there is no sense of real urgency – just dithering.  ‘Nature is always plentiful, and new technologies will surely come along’.

We are organisms not mechanisms – part of nature, not separate from her; yet we treat the earth like an object – a possession that we can exploit and rape at will.

In our top-down world, governed as we are by vast international corporations such as the petrochemical industry and banks, we are completely ignoring the reality of our position as one unique species reliant on all the others.

So what can we do?  We must ‘think globally and act locally’ – recognize that nature abhors centralisation.  In the natural world, lots of little things co-operate and contribute to the whole.

Today, most people have now become so divorced from the natural rhythms of nature that they have ceased to wonder where their food and drinking water actually comes from, and how the supply of both are now in jeopardy.

Some believe that GM crops will save us.  Not according to thousands of small farmers inCanadaand theUSAwho were sold the idea of bug resistant plants and increased yields.  Yes, GM worked for them for a few years, but as bugs mutated, the population of pollinaters declined, and yields fell, the multi-national GM companies such as Monsanto, still demand that these small farmers fulfil their contracts with them and buy their seed.

Ah, but plants have always been bred ever since humans started farming, some will respond.  Yes, they have, but until very recently, they have never had alien genes from other life forms injected into them – and we have no idea of the long term consequences.  Don’t forget, it was only just over 2 years ago, soon after the first genomes were de-coded, that scientists were saying that 80% was junk!  Now they realise that every bit of that so-called junk DNA can act as a transmitter / reactor with umpteen others at different times of the life cycle.

Is better plant breeding the answer?  Sometimes.  About 50 years ago there were hundreds of varieties of rice grown inAsia.  Today, there are only about ten main varieties, which at first, proved much higher yielding and disease resistant.  But bugs, viruses and bacteria are always mutating, and it is a constant struggle to maintain the same levels of productivity, particularly in a system of agri-monoculture where other plants are excluded which help maintain the health of an eco-system.

So where is the good news you must be asking?  Well, don’t look to the increasingly lignified corporate thistles that dominate the land.  Look to the tender green shoots sprouting locally.

Increasing numbers of people are realising that the uniformity of the corporate capitalist system, whose raison d’etre is ever increasing production, consumption and profit is completely unsustainable, because of it’s destructive onslaught and rape of the natural order.

In theUKfor instance there are now 350,000 people with allotments, and over 100,000 on the waiting list.  The National Trust is responding to people who want land to grow their own food, and opening up some of their properties.  Many farmers, particularly in the South West, have realised they can make more money by renting a hectare of their land to people wanting to work it, than they can from the Single Farm Payment.  The Urban Farm Movement, the so-called Rurbanites who grow crops on any unused land, co-operative farm shops and local farm markets are growing in strength.  More and more people are growing food and raising chickens in their own back gardens.

At a national level, the Co-op’s Plan Bee is attracting huge support, and even this government has had to respond to calls for opening up a few more marine reserves to help fish stocks recover.

Did you know that if you drilled an acre of land you might get four and a half to five tons of wheat or barley from it.  If you took that same acre and built houses on it to the right density, and assume the householders were all good gardeners, not only would you get approximately five times the quantity of food, you would have the choice of over 2,000 different varieties of food crops that can be grown in the UK!  ie small is beautiful, and often far more productive.

Nature is always differentiating.  No two snowflakes, grains of sand or even clones are the same or remain the same.  It is only human beings, who seeking uniform control over each other and over nature, are in opposition to difference and diversity.  This is particularly so today, when with the aid of our technologies, we are now so blindly anthropomorphic that we are blithely wiping out tens of thousands of species – from plankton to pandas, from good bacteria to bees  – species that are absolutely essential for our own survival.  Compared to even 400 years ago, what we see around us today in terms of flora and fauna – is a desert.

Yet, in our small minded, ignorant way we continue to invest our energies in arguing the case for a particular religious or political ideology, as the exploitation of the planet continues.  It really no longer matters whether we are capitalist or communist, atheist or believer – we are all in this together on this small planet.  Until we face up and realise we are commiting biocide we shall continue down this route to self-destruction.

 

I am not a Luddite – a technophobe looking back to some sort of idyllic eden.  I am all for appropriate technologies that work with nature of which we are an intimate and vital part. I want to see a sustainable society, one in the words of David Toolan, ‘that meets the needs of the present without comprising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.  It would be a system that respects the limits and the carrying capacity of natural systems.  It would be powered by renewable energy resources, and so far as possible, would emulate nature, where one organism’s waste is another’s sustenance.  It would be a re-use, re-cycle economy.  We have the technologies needed to make a sustainable society happen.  The question is – do we have the political will?’

My fear is that we don’t – because most people have forgotten that our very lives, let alone all cultural and economic activity, depends on maintaining healthy eco-systems – food and water

Life to the land brings life to the people.

You can’t eat money!

Imagine yourself as a civilian caught up in a global conflict while being drip-fed a range of selective and unconnected news items such that you had little or no time to gain much understanding of what was really going on, or of the overall strategy of your leaders. This blizzard of information would consist of advertising slogans urging you to buy more, rapidly changing economic forecasts and snippets of political, fashion, celebrity and sports news etc.  Unless you tried to cut yourself off from all of this, and make a serious attempt to make sense of what was happening to you, your neighbourhood and country, you would have little comprehension of the nature of the dynamic forces shaping your life, and of the whole architecture of the planet. I believe this is the position of most people today.

I would like to try and share something of my own understanding of what is happening to us all.

There are now over 7 billion people living on earth today, all of whom aspire, and are being encouraged to attain the same standard of living and affluent lifestyle that we enjoy in the ‘developed’ world.  Fact:  long before every Chinese, Indian, South American and African were eating and drinking as we do, stacking their fridge, driving a car, using a mobile phone, watching a flat screen television etc, the earth’s fertile land, available water resources, oil and rare earth minerals would be exhausted. Bluntly speaking, as has been said so often, our own wasteful, consumer lifestyle cannot be sustained if we continue to live as we do, let alone extend the same consumer model to the rest of the developing world.

Against the rush to seize the earth’s remaining resources, where do we in theUK and in the rest ofEurope stand?  As we all know Europe (apart perhaps fromNorway) is heavily indebted.  In fact, that debt is equivalent to 80% of the region’s economy, and is still rapidly increasing.  Do we print more money (quantitative easing) and cut back on public spending, or ‘go for growth’? But where are the new jobs going to come from?

In the UK, nearly a quarter of the workforce are paid employees of the state – NHS, teaching, police, prison, probation, social services, civil servants and local authority workers etc.  They pay taxes, but they do not earn the money for the nation’s export economy, the main driver of economic growth.  Small manufacturing companies have been starved of capital by successive governments who have courted International Conglomerates, Media Empires and Banks in their own drive for political power.  An increasing number of other businesses are now fattening themselves on tax-payers’ money in an attempt to deliver the privatisation of public services.

Against this background, the emerging economies of China, India, Brazil, etc have access to huge natural resources, burgeoning sovereign wealth funds, cheap labour, and in China’s case in particular, an increasingly educated and innovative work force – just as we once had in Victorian and early Edwardian times.

To put it bluntly, our developed economies are now old and increasingly decrepit, while theirs are young and vigorous.  Indeed, they an easily purchase or imitate any new technology we may invent, as well as offer, for a price, to build our Nuclear Power Stations, run our infrastructure, buy our Car factories or brand names such as Weetabix – now Chinese owned!

However , China, India and Brazil have their own very real problems, not least being the rapid migration of people from the countryside to the cities to seek work in factories producing consumer goods for the western world.  If we no longer buy such goods in the quantities we have previously bought, many of these factories will go bust, with potentially huge social disruption.

So, with increasing national debt and rising unemployment, where are the innovative, export earning jobs going to come from in the UK – jobs that will put people back to work as they make products to sell abroad to pay down our national debt and maintain our standard of living?

We have only to look at the collapse of the Greek economy to see what may happen to us here in theUK.  There, many are starting to move out of the cities into the countryside, while many who remain are living without electricity, and denuding the forests around them to get firewood.  A minority, as yet, are voting for a type of national socialism.

As others have been warning for some years now, we have been on a binge, and are now waking up to the reality of the physical and mental hangover, and the broken glass and furniture around us.

If enough people wake up, and begin to ‘think globally and act locally’ it may not be too late to begin to salvage some of the good things that contribute to the health and harmony of real community life.

I finish with three quotes (not quite accurate);

‘A man who does rich is a fool’
Carnegie

‘Gross National Product measures nothing that is really important in life’
Bobby Kennedy

‘The parents have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth have been set on edge.’
The Bible

 

Nothing in nature is centralised.  Lots of little things unite to make up the complexity of the vast variety of eco-systems. This is the fundamental and vital fact that the Green Party, governments, and indeed the great majority of people fail to understand.  We ignore this fact at our peril.

Consider political power;  the more a government tries to impose its own uniform way of doing things on local communities, the more resentful and rebellious will those communities become, as their local customs and initiatives are undermined or attacked.  If a government refuses to listen and becomes more autocratic, it will inevitably have to spend more and more time, energy and money imposing it’s authority.

Now consider the power of the five or six major energy companies in the UK which monopolise the market.  With government subsidies (ie our money) they build huge coal, gas and nuclear power stations, and arrays of giant wind turbines.  At least 40% of the energy generated is lost down the line – hardly efficient, and vastly expensive. But not only that;

Nuclear power is by far the most expensive way to generate energy if you take into account research and development, building, running and de-commissioning costs.  Its also potentially hugely dangerous, and in terms of climate change and rising sea levels, a blindly stupid course of action.  Energy generation from coal still accounts for about 50% o fUK energy needs and emits vast amounts of carbon dioxide.  Wind energy, in the form of arrays of giant turbines, not only radically alters the landscape, it destroys the spiritual and tranquil nature – those numinous, life-enhancing qualities that cannot be measured, much less appreciated by ‘bean-counters’, or indeed the Green Party whose local president seems to enjoy shooting wildlife!

So what is the answer?  As I have said before in this column, the only economic and environmentally wise solution is local energy generation.

If you were to erect a wind turbine on an industrial estate eg Pottington in Barnstaple, few would object and the landscape would not be despoiled.  If you were to install two or three small hydro units in rivers and streams running through towns and villages and wave generators beneath the cliffs of coastal communities – again few would be against.  If, instead of spending tens of billions of pounds on centralising power generation we had a programme of super-insulating every house and factory (energy conservation) and supplying solar panels, small wind generators, underground heat pumps, underfloor heating, heat-retaining glass etc etc etc, most of our smaller communities would be energy self-sufficient if not energy exporters.  Such a programme would raise revenue for those communities and provide huge employment opportunities.

None of these ideas are new.  The reason they haven’t been pursued is because of vested interests, and an arrogant belief that we are in control of nature, and to exercise that control we need a centralised command economy.  Instead of working with nature and applying our technical knowledge on a small local scale, we stamp on her and then grow misty-eyed as we view the disappearing landscape and wildlife. I would appeal to everyone, if you haven’t read it already, and if you have, re-read E.F. Schumacher’s book Small is Beautiful.  It might make members of the Green Party in particular withdraw their disastrous support for the proposed Atlantic array in theBristol Channel and the still static, Fullabrook eyesore!

Co-operation – The Only Sensible Way

Socialism failed: transnational, corporate capitalism, driven by greed, and without patriotism or borders, is squeezing the necks of governments and voters and funding the destruction of the planet.  Is there another way? From the outside, a co-operative may look like any other business; it’s what goes on inside that makes it different. Co-operatives are businesses owned and run by their members.  Whether the members are customers, employees or individuals, they are everyday people who have an equal say in what the business does, and enjoy a share of the profits the business makes One billion people in the world are members of co-ops and there are thirteen million people who are members of co-ops in theUK.  There is a co-op in everyUK postcode. Globally, co-ops are worth 1.6 trillion dollars a year – and growing. In theUk for instance, the co-op Bank was named as the world’s most sustainable Bank in 2010 because of it’s ethics.  It turned away half a billion pounds’ worth of business in the last few years because it refused to use it’s customers’ money to fund unethical business ventures such as the arms trade, animal experiments or ventures that would harm the environment etc.  During the current financial crisis it has not had to be bailed out by the government.  It only lends out from the resources it’s customers deposit with it ie it doesn’t speculate with customers’ money.  Because it holds to its values and principals, it has seen a 60% rise in customer deposits in the last three years. The United Nations has designated 2012 as The International Year Of Co-operatives.  From America (where many small towns and cities have co-operative energy-generation schemes) to Zambia, co-ops across the globe will be celebrating how we can build a better world.

Financial and Political Corruption – And Blindness

As Warren Buffet said ‘ when the tide goes out you can see who’s been bathing naked’.  As we are all now experiencing, the economic tide is ebbing fast, and we can all see what a skinny and loathsome lot our politicians, media barons and bankers really look like.  They live by their creed that ‘greed is good and avarice a virtue’.  With less and less water to swim in they are desperately trying to cover up their ‘privates’, and blaming each other for the mess they have got us into. The churches and educators have failed too.  The former have ignored the threat from the only great global religion – the worship of mammon (money) and are instead obsessed with sexual relationships.  The latter have bought into the myth that the purpose of education is not the traditional one of developing the individual’s mind, body and spirit, but to educate for the economy ie to fit ‘clots into slots’ – to produce obedient ‘battery hens’ who will produce and consume without asking questions. In fairness, how can the churches and educators compete with the omnipresent powers of the high priesthood of advertisers who control the media with their dominant message that the more you have the happier you’ll be. Meanwhile, twenty years after the first Rio Conference on the threats to the global environment, what conclusions did world leaders come to at the end of the second Rio Conference at the end of June?  Basically, things have got a great deal worse, very little has been achieved since ‘Rio 1’, and nothing much more can be achieved until the problems of the sinking global economy have been dealt with. ie. Keep sawing away at the overcrowded branch of the tree on which we’re all sitting! (So much for homo-sapiens).

Ever tried to open a bank account? How much documentation did they ask you for to prove your identity? You may only want to deposit a few hundred quid, but you are treated as a potential gangster. ‘I’m afraid we have to do this Sir to prevent fraud.  However, if you are an important Nigerian, such as the former governor of the oil rich DeltaState, who has been defrauding his poverty stricken electorate, ( most of whom have to exist on a dollar a day ), British banks such as RBS,  Barclays, HSBC and Nat West will happily launder your money with few questions asked. DittoNigeria’s former president, Mr Abacha.

From HSBC USA, HSBC London, HSBC Swiss private banking this once great bank, headed by Stephen Green (who wrote a book entitled ‘Serving God – Serving Mammon- reflections on money and morality in an uncertain world) has been condemned by the US Currency Regulator and a US senate committee, for handling stolen funds looted by various African dictators. Lord Green was in charge of HSBC for most of this period, and has now been co-opted by David Cameron onto the treasury team deciding how to reform British Banks!!

By the early 1990’s, money laundering through banks was so rife that in 1993 a European Directive was introduced to try and address the issue, and was adopted into UK law. Under it banks are meant to make stringent checks on all transactions, and report any suspicious activity to the authorities.

The Financial Services Authority has the power to prosecute money launderers – but has never prosecuted a banker, although small fines have been imposed on one or two banks eg. RBS, 82% of which is owned by us, the tax payers. ( Google Global Witness for more in-depth information ).

Given the ‘dog eat dog’ culture of the City of London, and the ease with which money can be laundered and tax avoided through British Overseas Territories such as the Cayman Islands and Gibraltar, together with Crown Dependencies such as Jersey and Guernsey, it is hardly surprising that so much illegal financial activity gets channeled through London’s financial centre.

Because of these tax havens, the British electorate is being squeezed (increases in taxes, cuts in public services ) while tens of billions of pounds of taxes owed by the rich, go unpaid. Further, these secret tax havens hold an estimated one trillion pounds of laundered money from developing countries – ten times what they receive in aid!

Sadly, one could continue for ever on this theme eg. the fixing of the Libor interest rate costing small businessess and mortgage payers billions of pounds of interest which need not have been paid, the £290,000,000 fine by the US authorities of HSBC for laundering Mexican drug monies, Standard Charters’ £217,000,000 fine for laundering Iranian money etc. etc. etc.  Note; if you or I ran a business and were found to be laundering money we would receive a lengthy jail sentence. In contrast, if you are a top banker, you merely ‘trouser’ a huge pay off, and are in the running to become the next Governor of the Bank of England!

Meanwhile, many so called financial experts writing in those bastions of democratic freedom – the National British press – are saying ‘stop bashing the bankers’. No wonder our expense fiddling MP’s have been trying to surf the wave of glory made by our great GB Olympians, in an effort to divert attention away from the greed and corruption at the centre of power.

If governments of whatever colour were serious about getting the British economy out of debt, they would be ensuring that all British tax havens would be closed down immediately or, be compelled to open up every account held there to the British tax man. But clearly its not in their financial interest.

They prefer to cut a couple of billion pounds off the welfare budget, rather than upset their super – wealthy friends by forcing them to pay their fair share of taxes.

 

 

 

 

A)  Some of you may remember a sci-fi film in which aliens gradually take over the world by sucking out human souls from their bodies before taking them over. I’m afraid that I now have firm evidence that this is no longer fiction – but fact!  A real human being is able to sympathise, empathise and think – not just in a binary, logical way, but laterally, analogically and imaginatively, i.e. Joined up creative thinking. In contrast, although an alien can be extremely intelligent, it can only think in straight lines.  Operating like a computer, it will have a separate program for X, and a separate program for Y – but will be unable to make connections between them.

Dear reader – there are aliens on Torridge District Council. How else to explain how their program X – trying to win a Mary Portas Award to revive Bideford Town Centre, and their program Y – considering planning permission for an out of town McDonald’s and Premier Inn, etc. on the woodland site opposite Atlantic Village?

How else to explain their program A – ‘consulting’ whether to spend over half a million pounds widening a road and building a café and BBQ area on Northam Burrows,  and their program B – how to prevent Northam Burrows being inundated by the sea and stop the toxic old tip site washing away and poisoning the Taw Torridge Estuary?

As I say, aliens don’t do joined up thinking; they lack the human gift of imagination.

Part of the training for an Outward Bound Course involved showing a client how to make a shelter in which he would live alone in the wilderness for two or three days. No mobile phone or TV – just the person alone with nature. They might be visited by a tutor during this time, who would sit with them for a while, and listen to anything they wanted to share, which had been repressed by the scramble to compete in the noisy, frantic world. For many, this was often the most memorable part of their Outward Bound challenge.

B) Chips, But No Fish

We are fortunate in N. Devon because we have the Marine Reserve aroundLundyIsland. It is proving hugely successful. Not so elsewhere, where alien intelligence in the E.U. and other government organisations in the world are engaged in mass piscine extermination.

Consider the following. In order to conserve fish stocks, trawlers, some trailing nylon, near invisible nets miles long, catch a huge tonnage of fish. However, only those fish of a certain size are allowed to be kept – the rest being thrown back into the sea, dead! Only an alien is unable to understand that small fish grow into big fish, and thus ploughing the oceans in this way inevitably leads to the wholesale destruction of fish stocks.

Consider – in September this year Marine Scientists suggested that there could be as few as a hundred fully mature cod left in the North Sea – because no cod over thirteen years old (their breeding age) had been landed inUK ports in 2011. In the early 1970s 360,000 tonnes of cod were caught in theNorth Sea. The E.U. has just put a quota of 32,000 tonnes of cod to be caught this year, but many think that even this figure is unsustainable, and will lead to a complete collapse of the cod fishing industry, as happenedNorthern Canada 20 years ago.

It is a similar story for salmon. Before 1950, which is when the feeding grounds of salmon were discovered offGreenland, salmon in British rivers such as the Taw & Torridge, were plentiful. Having almost trawled out theGreenland feeding grounds, an angler now considers himself fortunate if he catches a salmon in a British river.

There has also been a 95% collapse in eel numbers since 1980, but they can still be caught commercially. Ditto bass, which can only breed when they are about 42cm long – yet commercial fisherman are still allowed to bring them to market at 36cm in length!
The aliens can’t see a problem with all of this. They are already subsidising commercial fish farms, cramming salmon into cages like battery hens, and seem surprised when disease breaks out. Naturally, for them, they believe that antibiotics will eventually solve this difficulty. As alien control of the planet accelerates, anything free-range is considered uneconomic and rather primitive.
Dear Reader – how human and free-range are you? Don’t let the aliens suck the soul out of your body!
Don’t Send Me Information – Communicate

Once upon a time, a huge liner was constructed and launched with great fanfare and celebration. For the first time in history it was generally believed that this ship, unlike all other vessels which had sailed the world’s oceans in previous times, was unsinkable. The ships of other empires – Greek, Roman, Spanish, British, etc. – were all vulnerable, but now the latest science and technology had produced a vessel that could withstand any storm or accident. Mankind was quickly harnessing nature, and the Titanic was the hubristic expression of his new power.

When the Titanic hit that iceberg, there was stunned disbelief – but as reality broke in, trust in the ship and the relaxed routine of life on board, quickly dissolved. Reactions varied from outright panic and a desire to save oneself at any cost, to brave acceptance and self-sacrifice.

Imagine now that our consumer/technological empire is the Titanic. Most people, particularly in the ‘developed world’ have put their trust in the productive power of scientific invention. Despite the finite nature of the planet’s resources, they nevertheless subscribe to the idea of ever increasing production and consumption, entranced by the magic of technological gadgetry which allows them to instantly access and exchange information. This information revolution, it is believed, can now help overcome the ignorance of previous generations, whose leaders tended to keep the power of knowledge to themselves, and were able to manipulate and brainwash their subjects into accepting a subservient position.
But information exchange is not communication, whose meaning is rooted in the words ‘community’, ‘communion’ – the mutual knowing that lovers and poets do best ‘with sighs too deep for words’. I can know masses of information about someone I’ve never met, e.g. a celeb or politician, but until I spend time with them, talk, and above all listen to them – commune with them, I can never really know them.
Can more information make a nurse more caring? Just because you have an Oxbridge degree in Mathematics, does it automatically mean you are able to teach Mathematics to a class of thirty 15 year olds? An empathetic nurse may help me get better quicker, and an imaginative Maths teacher with no degree might well be able to enthuse me.
This is the great myth of the information revolution: it is assumed that the more people can access information, the more rational and intelligent will be their decision making; but all we are doing is training brains to process more and more information and assuming that the most intelligent people are the ones who can memorise or access the most, and regurgitate it in the required formats. Today you are seldom asked to think for yourself, place values on information, or attempt to see and respond to the relationships between things. Thus today, there are people leading big companies employing thousands of people, with degrees in accountancy or computer programming, who are emotionally semi-literate and have no feeling for history, poetry or the needs of their workers, or the Earth itself, i.e. They view their company like a machine – a computer program which they control, with regard to nothing else but profit. This is another example of alien intelligence at work.
In contrast, the analogy that I often find myself thinking about is that of the tree. Gales of information are blowing through the leaves and twigs – the brain. More and more people merely twitter and tweet, trying to respond to every nuance as the foliage is blown about: they feel they have no time, indeed many would be afraid to be still and silent, and let the deeper meaning of the branches and unifying trunk, let alone their spiritual roots, feed their minds and help them make creative sense of the swirling world of information battering their brains.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 And it came to pass in the second year when Cameron and Clegg were rulers of Britain and Barry Ben Parsons was Governor of Torridge that the people groaned and e-wailed under the burdens that the usurers and tax collectors had laid upon them.

 And they murmured amongst themselves saying

‘Our rulers have privatised the granary and are rigging the price of corn, and have stolen even that which we have saved up for our old age.

Yeah, our land is being stolen from us by mamaunders who destroy our fields and orchards and pull down our cottages so that they might build palaces for strangers who know not the way of our fathers.’

And the people said unto themselves ‘Why are we taxed so harshly?  Where are these taxes going but to fill the pockets of the King’s officers and usurers?’

Now the word of the Lord was scarce in those days, and the people did not cry out unto Him, for everyone did what was right in their own eyes and went a-whoring after the gods of celebrity and strictly come money-making.

And likewise the priests followed not the Lord’s command to chide the people and the rulers of the land for their worship of mammon.  Nay, but they raged amongst themselves saying

‘Shall a woman have equal authority with a man?  If we are to be holy should we not first have a right understanding of what men do with their dangly bits?’

And there was much confusion and gnashing of teeth.

And there was at that time an Irsharite dwelling in thelandofNortham, a scribe given to strange outbursts and dreaming.

And behold, he looketh out of his chamber and saw the desolation of the land, how the trees had been cut down and the fields abandoned such that many villas could be built upon them, yeah, even unto the edges of the seashore.

Yeah, and how the poor could not even buy a small hovel wherein to lay their heads, but were forced to toil unceasingly to pay rent to rich landlords while many great villas lay empty.

And the word of the Lord came to this man whose name was Jeremiah and sayeth unto him

‘gird up thy loins and get thee unto the wilderness that lieth beyond Skern, and stand though upon the great ridge that overlooketh theSevernSea.’

And Jeremiah did as the Lord commanded him, and went forth in his transit into the wilderness and stood upon the great ridge.

Then the Lord sayeth unto him ‘Lift up thine eyes and look unto the West; what seest  thou?’

And Jeremiah replied ‘ I see great towers Lord, like that ofBabelproudly reaching forth to heaven, and no wildlife remaineth there.’

Then the Lord sayeth unto him ‘Thou seest rightly.  They are an abomination unto me and unto the spirit of my servant Kipling.  They and their ilk are an offence to all who love justice and the beauty of my biosphere. 

Therefore get thee to that place and say unto the builders thereof, ‘behold, thus sayeth the Lord; I am bringing a great wind from the North and a great tempest of seas to destroy these abominations that thou has set up.  And there shall not be one stone left upon another.’

And the Lord said ‘Yeah, even this ridge upon which thou standeth shall be swept away.  Yeah, the waters shall cover even this wilderness, and they that strike their balls over it shall do so no more.  Verily verily I say unto thee, ships shall once more lay anchor beneath the shadow of Boot Hill.  Let he who has ears to hear let him hear.’

And Jeremiah fell on his knees and rent his anorak, and cried out with a loud voice saying

‘Lord, what of the righteous; wilt thine anger be kindled against them also?  What of the Irsharites and Richmondites, the Insodomites, Weird-giffodites and those that live nigh upon the way that leadeth by the house of Knapp and Hubberstone, who abhor mightily those who obey not the covenant of their ancestors, but go a-whoring after mammon.  Wilt thou destroy them also?’

And the Lord took Jeremiah up in vision and showed him the world that he had made.

And Jeremiah beheld the burning forests and dying seas, and the concrete that covered the earth that men had laid down over it, and the pollution that obscured the heavens and the abominations that maketh desolation.

And Jeremiah was struck dumb and laid himself down prostrate on the pebbles and wept.

Then the Lord spake unto him again after this manner

‘ If they repent and turn away from their greed, and honour truth and justice in their scales and in their council chambers, and look everyone to their neighbour and the stranger that is within their gates, and turn once again to the land that I have given them to care for it, then will I begin to open up the fist of my wrath and lay my open hand of healing upon them.’

Then Jeremiah rose up and mounted his transit, and made haste back to his chamber and wrote down all that the Lord had told unto him to say unto the rulers of the land in which he dwelt.

But they harkened not unto him.

 

 

 

As we mark 150 years of the founding of the Co-operative movement and the work of the Rochdale Pioneers, I find myself comparing the practical dynamics and motivation of their business model with that of the Co-operative Group and the other remaining Societies.

How can a business, originally designed to help and empower the poor, fulfil these original aims now that it has amalgamated and merged into a multi- billion pound combine directed and controlled from the centre?  To put it more brutally, has the Co-operative Group wandered so far away from first principles, that it has become just another Tesco or Asda, albeit with a broader range of Values and Principles and small divi?  Certainly the Co-operative Group, like its competitors, thinks globally, but does it act locally – apart from the Community Fund, which itself is mirrored by the other big four supermarkets with their funding of local community initiatives and annual support for a national charity?  Is the Co-operative Group that different?

Is it a contradiction in spirit and practice to try and be a Co-operative, corporate conglomerate as well as being a truly democratic Co-operative based around trading outlets? However much the Co-operative Group proclaims that it is owned by its members, the only power the ordinary member has is to elect their Area Committee Members, of whom I am one.  However, like many other elected members, I know that I have little power to influence the decisions and directives of the Main Board, its officers and CEO.

Given what it happening in the ‘Global Village’, and in our small part of it, I believe we need a rapid re-assessment of our role in our contemporary, atomised and debt ridden society. Consider the following.

A few weeks ago the Governor of The Bank of England said that he believed that the financial crisis gripping the western world could be the worst ever – worse than the Great Crash of 1929 where there was often a butcher and baker at the end of each street supplied by local farmers etc.  Today, everything is centralised.  Computerised, Distribution Centres send out trucks to deliver to food stores all over theU.K., and this transport, like so many other things, is totally reliant on oil.

Imagine a possible scenario:  a war or nuclear disaster in the Persian Gulf in whichIranblocks the straits of Hamuz, through which 40% of the world’s oil passes.  The price of oil would shoot to 200 dollars a barrel plus, and fuel on the forecourt would rise to at least £10 a gallon.  The added costs to the Co-operative Group, Tesco, Asda, etc for food store delivery would be enormous, let alone the cost to the food manufacturers.  Could we deliver?

Those of us who still refuse to compartmentalise our thinking into economics and the environment and social well-being, have for some years been aghast at the visionless policies put forward by self-interested politicians of all parties, who continue to separate these three things.  It was inevitable that the great world religion – the worship of the Golden Calf, would lead to troupes of political monkeys dancing to the tunes of the Corporate/capitalist organ-grinders, in particular the Oil Companies and Banks. Driven and blinded by greed, they invented ‘new financial instruments’ which have inevitably failed, but have resulted in making debt slaves of both citizens and nations.

The vision of the Rochdale Pioneers was entirely different.  They fought against local exploitation by relatively small capitalist oppressors – small shopkeepers, mill and mine owners etc.  They demonstrated a different way of doing business, and lit a fire that spread all over theU.K.and beyond with masses of small Societies fighting the same injustices in their own areas.  However, those early pioneers could not have foreseen the rise of the international conglomorates that trade across national boundaries, pay few taxes, know no patriotism and keep politicians in power.  Neither could they have foreseen that the one billion population of the world of their own day would grow to seven billion in 2011, and how the growth of mass consumerism, driven by mind-changing advertisers, would erode the physical health of people and planet.

But they knew about debt, and the effects of it’s pernicious human enslavement.  They also knew about the value of land, and bought increasing acres of it to grow produce for their co-op shops to ensure the supply of healthy food. It is my contention that the Co-operative Group  and other Co-operative Societies should be buying up more land and offering it to the tens of thousands of people who are seeking land to grow things on*.  These co-operative growers should be encouraged to sell their surplus produce to co-op shops.  (To it’s credit, the Group does encourage and support local farmer’s markets and community village shops etc.)  Were they alive today, I believe this is precisely what the Rochdale Pioneers would be advocating.  It would represent a much needed and welcome return to localism and democratic involvement in the movement.

Given the unique global, environmental and financial challenges we are facing can we find the courage to willingly return to the roots and vision of the Pioneers, or betray them, by stubbornly persisting with the dream of ever increasing production and consumption, which we all know in our hearts is unsustainable.

In the mid Devon town ofOkehamptonmany families are now reliant on soup kitchens and food parcels, and it will not be long before we see this sort of thing in other towns and cities.  Yet the cost margin between co-op food prices and the other big four supermarkets has now widened so much that previously loyal customers are abandoning our stores.  However, our diminishing active membership still clings to the pioneers’ original vision, and are waiting for the Co-operative Group to respond.

150 Years ago when the movement started, its prime aim was not to increase it’s ‘market share’, but something far deeper and socially transforming.  Yet today, even though we are so much wealthier, we are doing much less in terms of social justice and helping the poor.

As the price of  food continues to rise, together with unemployment, only the Co-operative Movement has the financial strength and original vocation to respond.  The question is – have the Boards of the Co-operative Group and remaining Societies the vision and motivation to think and act as radically as the Rochdale Pioneers did in their own day?

Given that food is our main business, we should start by facing up to the fact that all cultural and economic life is dependent on the earth, and despite western societies technical sophistication and organisation, this has not changed – and will not change.  We are organisms not mechanisms

* There are currently 110,000 people waiting for allotments in theU.K.

 

Jeremy Bell

Member of N,E,West Devonand Somerset Area Committee writing in a private capacity.

The importance of this question cannot be overstated, because those who argue that technological progress is the only path to human development often dismiss those who put the environment first as Luddites or green romantics, who hark back to some sort of mythical time when men and women lived harmoniously together in a vegan paradise.  As the economic and environmental crisis deepens, I believe that both these views are dangerous, and we all need to understand why.

Firstly, let me offer two historical examples to illustrate why even our smallest actions can have huge implications for all of us.

a)         In the mid nineteenth century one man introduced two rabbits intoAustralia.

As they multiplied and spread, the richer grasslands on which cattle were grazed started to deteriorate.  (Cattle are selective grazers, rabbits nibble everything down to the roots).  Such was the rapacity of the rabbits that a rabbit proof fence was constructed from the north to the south ofAustraliato try and prevent them from spreading into the west of the country.  People spent their lives constantly repairing it.  Sheep farming became more profitable, and the fleeces exported toBritain’s industrial woollen mills.  Thus, the introduction of these two rabbits effected the way the Australian economy developed, and in turn, that ofBritain.

b)         Before Henry Ford started to mass produce the motor car, much thought was given to the building of new towns and villages to house the growing population.

Progressive thinkers proposed the building of Garden Cities in which every house would have its own green area, e.g. Welwyn Garden City.  The advent of mass produced cars put paid to this movement as town planning was adapted to take account of this new form of transport.  Almost every planning permission today is granted on the basis that there is adequate parking and the road system can take the traffic flow.

So what are the implications for our own future and that of our children for the sorts of technologies that are part and parcel of our lives today?  Let us look at three examples.

a)         OIL  It is not only transport that is utterly reliant on oil, but every bit of plastic in your computer, phone, television, bin bag etc.  Without oil none of these things could exist.  Yet retrievable oil reserves are rapidly being exhausted, together with rare earth minerals which are essential for most electrical technology.  The most readily available oil reserves are in the Middle East; hence that region’s political importance and instability. China controls approx 95% of the world’s rare earth minerals, and naturally wishes to use them for its own growing internal market and manufacturing exports.  As a result political decision making revolves around the supply of oil and rare earth minerals.

b)         NUCLEAR – ‘TOO CHEAP TO METER’  The current estimated cost for decommissioningBritain’s aging nuclear power stations is 80 billion pounds.  Unlike coal or gas fired power stations, we can’t just walk away and leave them.  Successive governments have not only shifted this problem on to the economic back burner, but are planning to build new nuclear power stations mainly on the same sites ie. at sea level for cooling purposes.  Given that sea levels are rising and plutonium is radio active for at lease five thousand years, our politicians are either incredibly naïve or ‘barking mad’ in that they believe we will continue to have the nuclear technological expertise to look after them together with the waste they produce for that period of time, ie. the age ofStonehenge!

c)         COMPUTERS  – ‘THE PAPERLESS OFFICE’  We now consume more paper than ever before.  However, what is often overlooked is the physical and emotional effects of staring at a tv or computer screen for long periods of time and the cost to ourselves and the wider economy, e.g. i. memory becomes lazy (I can store it on a machine).  ii.  Imagination and creativity are constrained by the sheer volume of information pouring into the struggling brain.  iii. ditto real, as distinct from virtual human inter-reaction:  you cannot receive or communicate the deeper emotional and physical messages via a screen.  These can only be exchanged in personal head and heart conversations through physical meeting.  iv. We are not just brains, we are physical organisms, and unless we use our bodies they will degenerate.  The touch of the screen can never be a substitute for the touch of another human being.

So what is the answer – a retreat to peasant farming or a vain and hopeless quest for some utterly mythical Holy Grail of Technology?  As I wrote in last month’s column, without some sort of spiritual awakening, both the desire for a return to a rural idyll and some sort of techno-salvation are dangerous delusions.  No-one with any sense of history would want to return to the menial drudgery of peasant farming in a denuded bio-sphere, and neither would anyone with any vision want to seek to preserve the drivers of much of our banal materialistic culture – a culture that denies the young in particular, meaningful fulfilment.

All of us are going to have to get used to a reduced standard of living, so now is the time to ask ourselves what sort of society do we want.  A minority are already trying to do this by developing some sort of spiritual and emotional intelligence.  They can see that some technologies are benign, sustaining and appropriate, ie they are personal and work in harmony with the natural order, rather than being exploitive of nature and people.  Such technologies will always be small scale and local rather than vast centralised industries run by an elite.  The vision would be for local, self-sustaining economies that export their surpluses and unique products, and import what they cannot produce themselves.

THE ‘NEW’ REVOLUTION

Officers at Torridge District Council are to be congratulated on having identified areas in Northam Appledore and Westward Ho! for the potential construction of 2,142 new homes. Any ‘Nimby’ opposing these plans should pause and consider the vast amount of spare capacity at the Cornborough Sewage Treatment Plant, the huge number of job vacancies, the thousands of unused parking spaces, the hundred of unfilled school places, and the under-used Doctors’ surgeries and hospital etc etc.

Ever optimistic, at least TDC can see the coming massive upturn in the UK’s economic fortunes which, as we all know, is just around the corner, as Euroland with its cheap labour and technological prowess exports it’s way out of debt by sending billions of tv’s, computers and cars etc to the desperately needy Chinese, Indians etc. I saw 3 pigs flying over Appledore last week!

The reality is of course, that there are umpteen hundred second homes in the area that lie empty for most of the year (nationally, there are approx 850,000 empty properties), in addition to which developers in England are already sitting on planning permissions for 300,000 new houses. However, they have failed to build them, because in the economic downturn there is not enough profit in doing so. Naturally, governments of all colours are reluctant to hugely increase Council Tax on second homes to force the owners to rent them out because most MP’s already own 2 or 3, many of which were bought at taxpayers’ expense!

Tragically as with TDC, so at the national level we have had to endure successive administrations made up of often very clever and crafty people who have absolutely no vision beyond that of ever increasing production and consumption. Having strangled many small manufacturing businesses, and sold us all into economic slavery to the wide-boy bankers and international corporate capitalists, who have no patriotic loyalty whatever, the only hymn politicians seem to know (as exemplified by the recent party conferences’ speeches) is ‘Money Can Buy us Love, Security, Ecological Harmony and Everlasting Happiness – so long as we remember the Dunkirk Spirit and all slave away harder for tomorrow’s smear of jam over the mouldering bread and margarine.

However, do not despair. Underneath the rule-numbing, monolithic and increasingly lignified structures that is Government, there are some green shoots emerging from stock that have always prospered in the rich and fertile soil of Britain – plants that have always grown uneasily in the shadow of the alien mono-culture that has come to dominate and decimate the land.

To translate the analogy – substitute plant stock for people.

Huge numbers are now working allotments, and there are over 110,000 people on the waiting lists. Such is the size of this grass roots movement that the National Trust and farmers, particularly those in Cornwall, are opening up land for people to grow produce. The number of people keeping bees and chickens is rapidly increasing. More and more people are cycling or walking or home-schooling. I could go on. However, it is the growing number of people, whether born in this country or who have recently settled here, who are realising that there are limits to growth, and that having a huge flat screen telly in every room and changing your kitchen every 3 years, not only doesn’t make you any happier, but actually inhibits your real quality of life ie quality time to spend with each other, your children, your friends and interest groups. They seek a simpler more harmonious life-style; because they have come to understand that the rat-race is for stressed out rodents scrapping for rations dispensed by impersonal corporations, whose only interest is to demand more and more of their time and squeezing the last atom of energy out of them.

So politicians, beware when you talk of the need for ‘The Big Society’. Increasing numbers of people are turning away from the State religion – the worship of The Golden Calf. They are responding to a deep call within them to become ‘free range’, and rejecting your calls from the State Battery House to increase production and consumption at the expense of their own health and that of their land and communities.

Tell the truth. Not only have we mortgaged our children’s future, but nature herself can no longer sustain such a rapacious ‘civilisation’. If we want to survive in any meaningful way we must learn to put people before profit, and reconnect with the only real birthright we have – the Land of Britain, the health of which subtends all cultural and economic life.