at the heart of earth, art and spirit

January/February 2011 No. 264 £4.95 US$8.00

LEADERSHIP
OPENING A NEW DIALOGUE
“
Our interviews with Indigenous, Eastern and
other non-Western leaders have revealed a deep
awareness of the responsibility of leadership
toward both society and the Earth, and place
an intuitive value on both humanity and Nature
in symbiotic relationship. Honesty, benevolence,
custody of community and society, trusteeship,
teaching of knowledge and wisdom, contribution,
“
honesty and action are deeply held values across
many Indigenous societies.
– Sharon Turnbull, The Leadership Trust
Guest Editor of the Leadership special
 WELCOME

We Are All Leaders

E
very acorn is a We are all potential leaders,
potential oak. And if because we can all lead our
the right conditions own lives in the right direction.
of soil, water and We can show the world that
sunshine are met, something a good life can be lived without
as small and insignificant exploitation, subjugation or
as an acorn will become a domination of others, or of
mighty oak tree. In a similar natural resources. We can show
manner every human being is that a simple, wholesome and
a potential leader – provided equitable life can be joyful
that the right conditions are and good. We can show that
met so that leadership qualities happiness doesn’t flow from
of courage, commitment and material goods or the amount
selfless service can grow. of money in our bank accounts:
Just as every oak can offer rather, happiness flows from
shade for the weary traveller, the quality of the life we live,
a branch for a bird’s nest or a and the kind of relationships
beam for the farm barn, every we have with our families, with
human being has the potential our communities and with the
to care for the Earth, serve the natural world.
poor, liberate the oppressed and This is bottom-up leader-
scale the heights of imagination Whirl by Kakulu Saggiatok Courtesy: Kinngait (Cape Dorset) © Dorset Fine Arts ship. We don’t have to wait
and self-realisation. for a messiah. Genuine
The kind of leader we are concerned with in this issue of leadership is not going to emerge from parliament or
Resurgence is not a rare hero, not an ego-driven dictator, not a self- presidential palace. Leadership is not about legislation. The
conscious superstar, not a self-centred celebrity or a power-manic end of apartheid in South Africa, the establishment of civil
manager, but a humble host to humanity – a servant of the Earth rights in the USA, the dismantling of the Berlin Wall, the
and an ever-vigilant conscience of the people. Such a ‘servant’ dismemberment of the Soviet empire, and many other such
leader is as mindful of the process and purpose of life as she or transformations occurred in the history of humanity because
he is aware of the goals; there is no conflict between the means millions of people took action at grassroots level and refused
and the ends here. In the work of such a leader there is complete to accept the unjust order of the day. The feminist movement
harmony between what is to be done and how it is to be done. and the environmental movement are examples of people
True and effective leadership is more about inspiration, taking personal responsibility to participate in the process of
facilitation and right action than about outcome, achievements the great transformation necessary for a just, sustainable and
and unrealistic targets. resilient future for the Earth and her people.
A real leader leads by example. Anyone who demands, “Do True leadership is not about heroic headline-grabbing
as I say and not as I do!” is not a good leader. Integrity between actions: true leadership is to live and act with integrity and
words and deeds is an essential quality of inspirational without fear. Leadership has nothing to do with power, position
leadership. Mahatma Gandhi was once asked: “When you or office; nor anything to do with birth, class or status. Leaders
call upon people to do something, they follow you in their can emerge from anywhere: from the Royal Family, like Prince
millions; what is the key to your successful leadership?” Charles, or from a Maasai community, like Emmanuel Manjura
Gandhi reputedly replied: “I have never asked anybody to do – both of whom are featured in this issue.
anything I have not tried and tested in my own life. We have Leadership is an inner calling to lead ourselves and the world
to practise what we preach. In other words, we have to be the from subjugation to liberation, from falsehood to truth, from
change we wish to see in the world.” control to participation and from greed to gratitude.
One living example is more effective than a million words; We can all be leaders. All we have to do is wake up, stand up,
congruence between preaching and practice is a prerequisite live and act.
for purposeful leadership. Satish Kumar

Issue 264 1
CONTENTS
No.264 January/February 2011
FRONTLINE
4 ACTION FROM THE
GRASSROOTS
UNDERCURRENTS
8 THE PARADOX OF PRICE
Nick Robins
Why we cannot afford to forget the
benefits of Nature’s capital
LEADERSHIP SPECIAL
THE THEORY
12 GENTLE STEWARDSHIP
Sharon Turnbull – Guest Editor
How humility and shared respon-
sibility will better serve our planet
14 KEYNOTES:
FROM HERO TO HOST
Margaret Wheatley and Deborah
Frieze
Our new leaders will need to be
‘hosts’, not heroes
18 INSPIRING LEADERSHIP
Dave Bookless
Environmental leaders need a big
vision alongside local action
20 THE POWER OF
LANGUAGE
Thomas Moore
A good leader chooses the right
words to inspire and encourage us
22 ONE PLANET LEADERS
Jonathan Gosling and Jean-Paul
Jeanrenaud
A new kind of leadership requires
a new kind of training
THE PRACTICE
24 MAASAI LEADERSHIP
Emmanuel Manjura
Insights into respectful leadership
2 January/February 2011
14
26 THE MAKING OF HARMONY 40 ART IN NATURE
Ian Skelly Satish Kumar
HRH The Prince of Wales launches a Yorkshire Sculpture Park director
new project advocating harmonious Peter Murray shares his vision of
living between people and planet working with art and Nature
30 LEADERS AS DREAMERS
Elizabeth Wainwright
Introducing a trio of young and
REGULARS
inspiring change-makers
1 WELCOME
32 MAVERICK LEADERSHIP Satish Kumar
Susan Clark
Eden founder Tim Smit on why we
44 PROJECTIONS
Caspar Walsh
need a new radical and movement-
driven leadership 46 THE VEGETARIAN FOODIE
Jane Hughes
34 A LIFETIME OF EDUCATION
James Arnold-Baker 48 BIG FOOT, LITTLE FOOT
Profile of the activist Karl Jaeger, Mukti Mitchell
who teaches that collaboration
must replace competition
50 VOICE FROM THE SOUTH
Vandana Shiva
36 COMING OF AGE 52 SLOW TRAVEL
Rukmini Sekhar
Hannah Perkins
In talking about ‘Environmentalism’,
we must not neglect animals, says 54 WINTER GARDENING
animal activist Rob Laidlaw Brigitte Norland
38 FIGHT THE GOOD FIGHT 56 LETTERS
Leo Hickman
Film-maker and 10:10 pioneer
Franny Armstrong on what drives ARTS
her campaigning
58 POETRY
Edited by Peter Abbs
 www.resurgence.org
WEB EXCLUSIVES
New Generation Leadership:
Celebrating young movers and shakers around the world
Salim Mohamed, founder of Carolina for Kibera, Kenya, tells
his story
Jennifer Awingan, a young Igorot leader from the Philippines,
talks about a new kind of leadership

26 Kelvin Cheung, founder of UK-based Foodcycle, shares his

passion and vision
Also:
Celebrating 45 years of Resurgence magazine – A Tribute

Alick Bartholemew explains his book The Story of Water: Source

of Life

20 Juan Negrin explores the sacred

meaning behind the ‘Huichol’ yarn
painting of José Benítez Sánchez,
featured on page 12

REVIEWS
60 CONFLICT RESOLUTION
Peter van den Dungen reviews The Oxford
International Encyclopedia of Peace
BLOGS
New blogs on topical issues including Nature, science,
61 AN ENERGISING VISION
conservation and more
Caroline Walker reviews Full Circle,
Dame Ellen MacArthur’s autobiography
RESOURCES ONLINE
62 UNHURRIED EXISTENCE Heat loss calculator: how to save energy and money heating
Andrew Cooper reviews Elisabeth Tova
your home
Bailey’s The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating
e-books available for free download, on the themes of
63 ELUSIVE AND INTANGIBLE
Transition towns and Avatar
Eva Karczag reviews Turning Silk by Kinthissa
Tagore Festival: programme line-up, profile of artists, musicians
64 EARTH’S IMMUNE SYSTEM
and other contributors
Miriam Darlington reviews Richard Mabey’s
new book Weeds
66 SURVIVAL OF THE GENTLEST Front cover:
Woman and Snow Bird by Pitaloosie Saila
David Cadman reviews John Lane’s The Art of 1973
Ageing Stonecut and stencil
61x43 cm
67 THE FUNDAMENTAL DUALITY Courtesy Kinngait (Cape Dorset) © Dorset
Linda Proud reviews Patrick Harpur’s Fine Arts
A Complete Guide to the Soul Front cover and welcome images come from Tuvaq: Inuit
Art and the Modern World, by Ken Mantel. Published by
Sansom & Company, 2010. ISBN: 9781906593421

MEMBERS
68 COMMUNITY PAGE
Elizabeth Wainwright
FOR CONTACT INFORMATION
80 READERS’ OFFERS AND GROUPS FOR RESURGENCE OFFICES AND
AGENTS, PLEASE SEE THE INSIDE
69 ADVERTS BACK COVER

Issue 264 3
FRO N T L I N E  AC T I O N F RO M THE GRASSROOTS
GLOBAL
THE PLASTIC BEACH
Midway: Message from the Gyre (2009) albatross chick
Marine pollution is a disgusting manifestation of modern consumerism
and it necessitates rethinking the ‘story of packaging’.
O ver 70% of planet Earth is covered
by oceans, yet we know more
about the surface of Venus than we do
about the ocean floor. One thing we do
know about the oceans, however, is that
plastic pollution pervades them: not just
circulating in the massive gyre in the
Pacific but in at least five enormous gyres
in the North and South Pacific, the North
and South Atlantic and the Indian Ocean.
Plastic pollution also finds its way onto
beaches across the world, even those
thousands of miles away from human
habitation, and at the poles.
Researchers from the United Nations
Environment Programme estimate that
46,000 pieces of marine debris can be
found in every square mile of ocean, but
this is to say nothing of the plastic that
has already degraded into microscopic
particles, secreting toxic chemicals into
the marine environment in the process.
Research by the University of
4 January/February 2011
Southampton’s National Oceanography
Centre shows that these microscopic
particles are finding their way into the
food chain, turning mussels and lugworms
into sterile hermaphrodites (because
when plastic becomes soluble, it acts as an
endocrine disruptor). Worryingly, all UK
coastal waters contain plastic ‘dust’.
Worryingly, all UK coastal waters contain plastic ‘dust’
As a consequence, at the very least,
one million sea creatures are killed every
year by ingesting plastic particles, plastic
bags, bottle tops, toothbrushes, cigarette
lighters and the like, particularly red
plastic waste, which is mistaken for krill
and is snapped up by albatross and minke
whale alike, creating the illusion that
the creature is full whilst it is starving
to death. Chris Jordan’s shocking
photographs (see above) illustrate how
all albatross chicks on Midway Island
Photo: © Chris Jordan
in the North Pacific, 2,000 miles from
human habitation, have consumed
plastic pollution, which kills hundreds
of birds in this colony alone every year.
At a recent lecture at the Royal
Geographical Society in London, keynote
speakers from the National Oceanography
Centre and the British Plastics Federation
(BPF) and activists from the Plastiki
project (featured in Resurgence issue 261)
gathered to discuss the situation.
Nothing can be done to retrieve
the plastic that has already found its
way into the oceans, despite the rather
feeble suggestion by the British Plastics
Federation (BPF) that fishermen can be
paid to ‘Fish for Litter’: the problem is
so huge that the number of boats needed
to do this and the carbon emissions they
would create make nonsense of this idea.

Surely not producing the stuff in the first place is the answer,
especially when you consider that most of the plastic ever
manufactured is still in the environment and much of it is in
the oceans.
We must stop any more plastics from getting into the oceans,
and as a significant percentage of marine pollution comes from
packaging for foodstuffs and cosmetics, this is a good place
to start. The plastics industry is making some efforts in this
respect – the Plastics 2020 Challenge endeavours to work with
local authorities to divert plastic from landfill and by 2020 to
double the recycling rate of the plastic produced every year to
50% – but that still leaves a huge amount that will inevitably
find its way into ecosystems. All types of plastic are recyclable
up to six times and can then be burned to use the embedded
energy one final time, although of course incineration throws
up its own environmental problems.
But much plastic is used for what Plastiki activist David de
Rothschild calls “Dumb Plastic” – the single-use plastics that
do so much damage, but which we could find an alternative for
right away: plastic bags, styrofoam cups and lids, plastic bottles
and plastic bottle tops. One small innovation – joining the
bottle top to the bottle itself so that they cannot be separated
– would save thousands of sea creatures’ lives. Another – not
producing red plastic – would save thousands more. Or why
not have a deposit charge on all plastic bottles, as in the past
with glass bottles, which encourages high recycling levels?
But of course, recycling, reusing and reducing plastics is just
so much sticking-plaster on the gaping wound of planetary
pollution. What we have to do is stop producing plastic
packaging altogether. Rothschild suggests we need to create
a new story about packaging, one where it is not acceptable
under any circumstances to produce something that is toxic or
single-use or that creates pollution.
This is where the exciting new field of transmaterials
comes in. ‘Transmaterials’ refers to the myriad emergent
material technologies that are transforming and redefining
our physical environment through synergies between ecology,
sustainability, technology and design – and they are offering
some interesting new stories, such as packaging that grows
itself and biodegrades: rice husks, which are currently an
agricultural waste product, can be injected into a variety of
moulds, followed by mycelia (fungal strands), which grow
through and around the rice husks (at room temperature, in the
dark, so there are no embedded energy issues) to sustainably
create packaging trays and other materials that can go straight
on the compost heap after use.
Or how about plastic bags that can now be made from a water-
soluble polymer which will degrade harmlessly in water, leaving
no toxic residues or the floating jelly-fish look-alikes that kill
thousands of turtles every year? Produced by British company
Cyberpac, this revolutionary plastic bag is one of many products
that will help to transform the story of packaging.
Every time we throw away a plastic bag or yoghurt pot,
we are complicit in ecosystem demise, so let’s support those
organisations that are addressing this issue through innovative,
cradle-to-cradle design. I wrote to the Good Natured Fruit
Company last year to congratulate them on their cardboard
trays for strawberries and raspberries, which have a cellulose
window to show the quality of the fruit. They wrote back and
sent me a plastic strawberry key ring by way of thanks!
Issue 264
by Lorna Howarth
INDIA
RICE POWER
Waste not, want not
R ice husks also play a part in a good news story from
India – one that is helping to redefine the concept
of waste. It was in fact Buckminster Fuller, the visionary
American inventor, who first realised that “Pollution
is nothing but resources we are not harvesting” – and
innovative businesses the world over are cottoning on to
this fact and rethinking ‘waste’.
Take as an example Husk Power Systems (HPS),
which is using a by-product of the agricultural industry
– rice husks – to produce electricity using ‘biomass
gasification technology’, providing over 50,000 Indians
with sustainable, affordable power. Until now, rice husks
have been dumped into landfill, or at best on compost
heaps, but HPS now uses them in 35 micro-power plants
throughout India’s north-eastern rice belt to produce
eco-friendly electricity. As the rice husks are heated they
produce energy, and HPS has developed technology that
filters the released gas and runs it through a diesel-like
engine to generate electricity. The silica, which is a waste
product when rice husk is burned, is then sold to concrete
manufacturers. Husk Power Systems is now working with
the Indian government on getting Clean Development
Mechanism certification to sell carbon credits associated
with the plants.
GREEN CUISINE
Mumbai’s first veg box scheme
I n a move that enables subsistence farmers to market their
produce in one of the world’s biggest cities, the Mumbai
Organic Farmers and Consumers Association (MOFCA) is
currently trialling the city’s first organic vegetable box scheme,
Hari Bhari Tokri (‘basket full of greens’), which, if successful,
will be rolled out to give more farmers in the city’s hinterland
the opportunity to receive a fair price for their vegetables.
Founder member of MOFCA Saha Astitva (‘co-existence’) –
itself a small social and environmental NGO employing youth
workers who might otherwise find themselves blighted by
social injustice – contributes to the box scheme via its own
eco-farm, set up to equip young people with the skills needed
to thrive in the modern world whilst keeping an ecological
and spiritual perspective on all that they do.
Saha Astitva uses the sacred banyan tree as a symbol of
its own efforts, its lateral branches reaching out to support
diverse communities in myriad ways. In order to underwrite
its ongoing work providing wholesome food, protecting
the environment and finding sustainable livelihoods for
adivasi (tribal people), the founders of Saha Astitva welcome
volunteers from all over the world and have set up Shivaloka
(www.shivaloka.net), a private company offering unique
Indian spiritual tours, which donates all of its profits to
Saha Astitva (www.thankindia.org).
5
RAINFOREST SEQUESTRATION
Building an element of climate protection into electricity provision
B y switching their electricity provider
to industry newcomer Ovo, 30,000
people in the UK have each become a
‘guardian’ of an acre of the Amazon
rainforest. In an interesting initiative,
launched by Ovo in partnership with
environmental charity Cool Earth, the aim
is to sequester a proportion of the CO2
emissions of each customer by protecting
an acre of rainforest. It is estimated that
the sequestration potential of an acre of
rainforest equates to 260 tonnes in CO2
emissions per customer. The average
person in the UK emits around 11 tonnes
of carbon dioxide per year, so in theory this
service will sequester one person’s carbon
dioxide emissions for approximately 23
years if the rainforest remains protected.
Ovo customers are currently protecting
an area of rainforest the size of Manchester,
preventing nearly 8 million tonnes of CO2
TRIBAL TRIBULATIONS
Indigenous rights prevail over corporate greed
Dongria Kondh protest against Vedanta Resources, Niyamgiri, India Photo: © Survival
“This sends a signal to the big corporations that they
can never assume that might is right” – Michael Palin
6 January/February 2011
emissions. That’s around the same amount
of CO2 that would be saved by putting
solar panels on every household in
Britain, and shows the value and potential
of this scheme.
With deforestation creating a fifth of
the world’s carbon emissions, this single
initiative is tackling climate change on
two fronts – sequestration and rainforest
conservation – and every time a new
customer switches to Ovo, another acre
is protected. One of the UK’s leading
climate-change scientists, James Lovelock,
endorses this action, saying, “It’s great to
see an energy company taking a global
approach to climate change.”
Each Ovo customer receives a
personalised certificate and details of
their rainforest acre in the Ashaninka
region of the Amazon in Peru. Typically
an acre contains around 44 mature trees,
190 saplings, six endangered species and
thousands of insect species. Half of the
£6 cost of sponsoring an acre is met by
Ovo, and the other half (25p per month)
is built into the company’s tariff.
The Ovo/Cool Earth partnership is
committed to protecting rainforest that
is in imminent danger and, without
intervention, would be cut down for
timber or burnt to make way for crops.
The partnership protects the rainforest
by working with local communities to
make sure that, standing, it’s worth more
to everyone than cut down.
The question remains, if it only costs
£6 per acre to protect rainforests in this
way, why aren’t other energy providers
offering this service too?
For more information visit:
www.ovoenergy.com/coolearth
I n the summer of 2009, Resurgence
published an article by Mark Helyar
which detailed the David vs Goliath-
type struggle that India’s Indigenous
Dongria Kondh community were facing
in Orissa state as giant mining company
Vedanta Resources sought to quarry their
sacred hills for the bauxite beneath. In a
four-year real-life struggle that echoed
the film Avatar – yet received little of the
media attention the film enjoyed – the
Dongria Kondh refused to give up the
fight, effectively eliciting the lobbying
might of international NGOs to support
their cause.
In an extraordinary and unexpected
move, India’s Environment Minister,
Jairam Ramesh, has blocked Vedanta’s
plans, saying they had shown “a shocking
and blatant disregard for the rights of
tribal groups”. Amnesty International,
whose members sent 10,000 letters of
protest to India’s Environment Minister,
hopes this will act as a wake-up call
to other corporations whose reckless
profiteering threatens sacred lands. In the
words of actor, broadcaster and Amnesty
supporter Michael Palin, this “sends a
signal to the big corporations that they
can never assume that might is right. It’s
a big victory for the little people.”
London Futures Aerial Flood: London as Venice Photo: © Robert Graves and Didier Madoc-Jones
UK
POSTCARDS FROM THE FUTURE
Climate change – coming to a town near you
I n a bid to draw attention to the ways in which climate
change could affect the UK’s capital city, a series of 14
photomontages is currently on display at the Museum of
London. With views of the iconic Royal Mall flanked by
wind turbines and Buckingham Palace surrounded by a
shanty town of slums where climate refugees have fetched
up with nowhere else to go, this vision of a potential
future for London may seem far-fetched to some, but to
others these scenarios are not only a real possibility, but
help people to connect with how climate change might
affect their lives.
As Cathy Ross, Director of Collections and Learning at
the Museum, explains, “For most of us climate change
is the kind of thing that might happen somewhere else.
These pictures of London have enormous impact and really
challenge the viewer to confront how climate change could
Lorna Howarth is Development Director of Artists Project Earth (www.apeuk.org)
Issue 264
shape London and their own life in the city.”
Charlie Kronick, Senior Climate Advisor for Greenpeace,
takes a deeper perspective: “If we’re going to tackle climate
change, then we’re going to have to tackle our addiction
to oil. And forget about Houston or Dallas, there’s a real
oil town just down the road from the Museum of London.
The money in the City of London, and in many people’s
pension funds, keeps the oil flowing, not just in the Gulf
of Mexico, but in the Arctic, west of Shetland and in the
tar sands of Canada. If we’re going to keep oil out of the
most fragile environments on Earth, then we’re going to
have to get oil out of the City as well.”
London Futures is indeed a thought-provoking
exhibition and is on until 6 March 2011.
www.museumoflondon.org.uk
7
UN D E R C U R R E N T S  T H E G R EEN ECONOMY
The Paradox of Price
The lack of market prices for ecosystem
services means that the benefits
they provide are usually neglected or
undervalued, writes Nick Robins
“
Every man has his price,” declared one of Britain’s
most cynical prime ministers, Robert Walpole, in
the early 18th century. Three centuries on, we’re
approaching the culmination of a 30-year struggle
to decide whether every species, every ecosystem, every
emission also has its price. And the outcome will have
profound implications for our ability to honestly confront
the reality of an impoverished natural world.
A harsh reality of the global economy is that Nature
is largely invisible to the decisions taken by billions
of producers, consumers and investors. In a world of
exchange, too many of the innumerable services that
Nature provides us for free – from the pollination of plants
to the regulation of temperatures – simply have no price
in the global marketplace. According to The Economics
of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) project, which
published its final report last October, “the lack of market
prices for ecosystem services and biodiversity means
that the benefits we derive from these goods are usually
neglected or undervalued”.
Not only are the good things of Nature left unpriced, but
the bad things we impose on others – depletion, pollution
and waste – cannot be comprehended by the market.
We know from Nicholas Stern that climate change is the
“greatest and widest-ranging market failure ever seen”.
These phantom externalities haunt the economy, corroding
its ability to sustain human wellbeing and natural vitality.
That the raw physicality of the planet still remains outside
the cut and thrust of economic calculation remains one of
the many failures of the dismal science – the ‘missing planet’
problem. The obvious solution is to put a price on Nature:
this will give value to the valueless and enable integration
into corporate accounts and consumer transactions.
For decades, a generation of environmental, ecological
and green economists have been struggling to construct
both the theoretical models and the policy prescriptions
that remedy the market’s myopia. The starting point is to
recognise the economic value of Nature and its destruction.
In one of the latest efforts, a coalition of investors
(representing more than US$20 trillion in assets) have assessed
the extent of environmental externalities from pollution,
water use and resource extraction. The conclusion? The global
economy currently generates US$6.6 trillion in external costs,
8 January/February 2011
or 11% of global income. This is projected to rise to some
US$28.6 trillion – 18% of global income – by 2050. What
separates this initiative from previous academic exercises is
the recognition among some of the world’s largest investment
institutions that cutting these environmental externalities
would be beneficial to their portfolios.
After recognition comes action – turning this new-
found value into something that moves markets in the
right direction. For example, if too many greenhouse
gases are being pumped into the atmosphere, put a
price on carbon. As Nick Stern explained, “putting an
appropriate price on carbon – explicitly through tax or
trading, or implicitly through regulation – means that
people are faced with the full social cost of their actions”.
From almost nothing five years ago, a complex market
in carbon now exists (worth some US$144 billion in
2009). If the manifold benefits of well-managed forests
– including carbon storage and water provision – stand
unrecognised in the marketplace, make users pay for
these ecosystem services. Across the world, payments for
watershed and biodiversity-related services amount to
almost US$20 billion, which could grow to US$55 billion
by 2020, according to TEEB.
From the beginning, however, there’s been an
instinctive squeamishness about pricing the priceless.
“Nature is our capital. The interest
it yields is all we may use. If we
encroach on that capital, we shall
eventually go bankrupt”
– Wouter van Dieren
Appropriately entitled Nature’s Price, Wouter van Dieren’s
1977 classic tackled this problem head-on. For him,
“Nature is our capital. The interest it yields is all we may
use. If we encroach on that capital, we shall eventually
go bankrupt.” But he accepted, too, that there are many
who believe that “Nature is insulted by the application
of financial values” and so he started his pioneering
exploration of how economics could work in favour of
conservation with an apology to these sensitive souls.
Today, the best advocates of economic valuation
recognise the clear limitations of financial measurement.
Take Pavan Sukhdev, leader of the TEEB initiative, who
argues firmly against “the glib modernist approach in
which we price everything and it will all be OK”. The
failure of the financial system in the credit crunch has
provided a salutary warning that even if we ascribed the
 correct price to Nature (whatever that might be),
we have no guarantee that markets would effectively
translate this into appropriate human behaviour.
Pricing Nature is the start of a conversation, is almost
always metaphorical and needs to be buttressed by
alertness to its unintended consequences.
These unintended consequences have become
overwhelming in the case of carbon trading. Once
seen as the centrepiece of climate policy following
the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, carbon trading is now
associated with fraud, ill-gotten gains and, most
tellingly, a failure to actually drive down emissions.
Larry Lohmann has long been a critic of carbon
trading – and in a recent article he unpicks “carbon
markets’ inbuilt bias against the structural change
demanded by the climate problem”.
In an era of financialisation, carbon trading
emerged as the ideal policy tool to confront
climate change, not least because the principal
beneficiary was the financial sector. After a severe
setback in Copenhagen in 2009, advocates of
carbon markets failed to win agreement last year
for a cap-and-trade programme in the US – not just
because of opposition from denialist Republicans
and entrenched coal lobbies, but also from deep
concern at the financial gouging that could result
from a continental trading regime.
Getting the price right remains key to
environmental progress – but we are wiser now
after a decade of actual practice about how to do
this. There is less interest in a theological debate over
the precise financial value of ecosystems, and more
about how markets are failing in myriad ways to
sustain Nature. For example, over a trillion dollars a
year is still spent by governments to subsidise fossil
Nyuntjin, by Tony Tjakamarra (detail) Image: Private Collection/Dreamtime Gallery/The Bridgeman Art Library

fuels, intensive agriculture and excessive water use

– 10 times more than for renewables or organics.
In an era of austerity, these ‘perverse incentives’
need to be repurposed to build the infrastructure
for a green recovery. And environmental tax reform
offers a more robust way of driving down pollution
than a volatile trading market. Carbon taxes not
only send a clear price signal, but also offer a way
of funding breakthrough clean technologies. And
at a time when Nature is increasingly scarce and
unemployment is rising, carbon taxes can also be
used to substitute for job-destroying taxes on labour.
All of this offers a more positive way of
proceeding. As the influential Hartwell Paper argues,
it’s critical to reframe the environmental agenda
around matters of human dignity, “not just because
that is noble or nice or necessary – although all of
those reasons – but because it is likely to be more
effective than the approach of framing around
human sinfulness – which has just failed”.

Nick Robins is a founding trustee of the Resurgence Trust

and is co-author of Sustainable Investing: The Art of Long-Term
Performance (Earthscan). The Economics of Ecosystems and
Biodiversity (TEEB): www.teebweb.org

Issue 264 9
SPE C I A L F E AT U R E

Leadership

10 January/February 2011
Water is altruistic because it supports life
Water is modest and humble because it always takes the lowest ground
Water is adaptable and flexible because it can stay in a container of any shape
Water is transparent and clear

Lao Tzu – the 6th-century BCE father of Daoism – used the metaphor of water many times to explain
the ideal form of leadership.

Maggi Hambling: The North Sea

The inaugural exhibition to celebrate the opening of Europe House – The European Commission and European Parliament in the UK
12 Star Gallery, London, SW1P 3EU
8 December 2010 - 28 January 2011
The Aldeburgh Scallop by Maggi Hambling is published by Full Circle Editions

Issue 264 11
LEA D E R S H I P  I N T RO D U C T I ON
Our Elder Brother Kauyumari’s Nierika, yarn painting by José Benítez Sánchez
For a full explanation of the painting’s meaning see www.resurgence.org
Gentle Stewardship
Humility is the key to ‘good’ leadership
and the antidote to those models of
‘heroic’ leadership that were always
doomed to fail, writes Sharon Turnbull
H
ow does leadership serve our planet and
our society? For many, this question
might provoke an emotive or negative
response, especially amongst those for
whom the idea of leadership evokes the world of
politics and big business. Tainted by corporate
scandals, expense rows (in the UK) and short-
12
Courtesy: Wixarika Research Center http://wixarika.mediapark.net/en/index.html
termism, and tarnished by narcissism, selfishness
and abuse, leadership in the 21st century has lost
its appeal, and for many, this overused and devalued
word has become meaningless, even dangerous.
The paradox facing society today, however, is that
leadership may nonetheless be the only credible
solution to the web of complex problems and
urgent challenges facing our planet. And the public’s
understandable rejection of leadership as a failed
concept may now be stalling the emergence of a
radical new model of ‘good’ leadership for the world.
Without ‘good’ leadership, we risk descending
further into a materialistic chasm that ignores the
needs of the Earth and its many inhabitants.
Leadership in the Anglo-American world has
January/February 2011
long been obsessed with personal traits and competencies, a
holy grail for effective leadership. By defining leadership in
this way, we have been unable to move away from a stultifying
person-centred view of leadership that worships leader as hero.
The cult of personality in contemporary Western society is
everywhere, dominating our media and our literature with its
insidious attraction. The vast majority of leadership books are
about one man’s (or very occasionally one woman’s) leadership
journey. But those we place on such pedestals are ultimately
destined to criticism and perceived failure by the very people
who seek such infallibility: Obama, Mandela, Gandhi, Kennedy,
even Jesus and the prophets – all of these have been expected
to be free of human flaws, and then later accused of human
weaknesses and frailty.
It is time to admit that the expectation we place on individual
leaders is unrealistic and unsustainable, and that we must all
now engage in and accept our shared leadership responsibility
for society and our planet.
So how can we make progress towards developing this new
form of ‘good leadership’?
Firstly, we must change what we mean by leadership, and
move away from the narrow idea that leadership relates to the
capabilities of a single individual. Leadership can be a shared
phenomenon. Indeed, for many ancient societies leadership
and decision-making is a shared process, with all members
contributing a voice, from the oldest and wisest to the youngest
and most curious.
In many such societies, the remit of the chief or elder is to
seek ideas and consensus and safeguard the reflective process
towards the best possible outcome – a stark contrast with the
heroic leadership model that we have internalised in the West.
Secondly, we need to encourage a humble and collective
leadership that will influence actions and outcomes in all
corners of our organisations and communities. According to
Joseph Badaracco’s book Leading Quietly, it is the many acts of
quiet leadership at all levels and across society that will propel
the societal and ecological transformation we so desperately
need. For Badaracco, humility is an antidote to the heroic
leadership that has dominated our mindset for so long both in
the Western world and beyond.
Two of the most important omissions in Western leadership
theory today are purpose and responsibility. Leadership texts
often suggest that leadership is about winning over and engaging
followers, but rarely do they address the crucial sense of moral
purpose that is needed at the heart of leadership. Jim Collins’
book Good to Great suggests that ‘good’ is not enough: leaders must
aim to be ‘great’. My view is that ‘good’ is the quest to which
leaders must aspire in order to be called leaders. It is the only
route to addressing the deep ecological and spiritual imbalances
that we humans have created, and to a return to a sense of soul
and oneness with the Earth.
How many of our apparently intractable problems would
disappear if leadership simply focused on ‘goodness’? A
colleague and friend of mine, Jonathan Gosling, frequently asks
his MBA students: “Does a leader have to be good to be good?”
This question invariably keeps the group occupied for hours in
heated debate! For us, ‘goodness’ is a complex and challenging
aspiration, but a worthy goal for leadership.
In his book Should Prometheus be Bound? Philippe de Woot
argues that the current dominant market ideology of the firm
Issue 264
has contributed to the crisis of ethics in today’s
globalised world. The recent corporate scandals
and their aftermath have, he points out, focused
largely on breaches of integrity and trust within the
rules that preserve the status quo of 21st-century
capitalism. As globalisation advances, de Woot
declares that a dominant ideology that reveres wealth
creation, free trade, profit and financial orthodoxy
over global sustainability and social justice remains
unchallenged. The solution, he argues, is to build
an ‘ethic of conviction’ that focuses on the type of
society we wish to build, combined with an ‘ethic of
responsibility’ that challenges the instrumental logic
of today’s society. Responsibility and stewardship,
We must all now engage in and accept
our shared leadership responsibility for
society and our planet
both underused words in today’s society, are key
triggers for such ‘good’ leadership.
Alternative mindsets found in Indigenous
societies or ancient Eastern texts can offer much
to those seeking to tackle the world’s problems. In
our Worldly Leadership research, initiated by The
Leadership Trust, we have discovered that reflecting
on leadership through lenses that challenge the
narrow paradigms of Western thinking has thrown
glimpses of light on a path that could lead to a more
connected, relational and responsible world.
Our concept of Worldly Leadership is grounded
in an idea first put forward by Henry Mintzberg
and Jonathan Gosling in their article ‘The Five
Minds of the Manager’ (published in Harvard Business
Review) that a ‘worldly mindset’ is one of the key
mindsets needed for leaders today. By this, they
refer to an ability to see the world from close
up, understand the many different worlds within
worlds that make up our globe, and take action.
Our Worldly Leadership project foregrounds
questions of responsibility and sustainability,
focusing on the collective nature of the leadership
process, and the relational nature of leadership. It
also emphasises human dignity, global fairness and
justice, thus resonating with de Woot’s call for a
leadership ethic of responsibility and conviction.
It is time for ‘good’ leadership. Greatness is yet
another ideal that must fade as we move away from
the many destructive actions that have typified the
20th century. One man or one woman alone cannot
change the world. We need leadership that connects
and enables the many quiet acts of stewardship that
will safeguard our world for future generations.
Sharon Turnbull is Director of the Centre for Applied
Leadership Research. For more about The Leadership Trust
visit www.leadership.org.uk
13
LEA D E R S H I P  K E Y N OT E S

From Hero . . .
We need to abandon our reliance on the ‘leader-as-hero’
and invite in the ‘leader-as-host’. Margaret Wheatley and
Deborah Frieze explain why

F
or too long, too many of us have been
entranced by heroes. Perhaps it’s our desire
to be saved, to not have to do the hard work,
to rely on someone else to figure things
out. Constantly we are barraged by politicians
presenting themselves as heroes, the ones who will
fix everything and make our problems go away. It’s
a seductive image, an enticing promise. And we
keep believing it. Somewhere there’s someone who
will make it all better. Somewhere, there’s someone
who’s visionary, inspiring, brilliant, trustworthy, and
we’ll all happily follow him or her. Somewhere…
Well, it is time for all the heroes to go home, as
the poet William Stafford wrote. It is time for us
to give up these hopes and expectations that only
breed dependency and passivity, and that do not
give us solutions to the challenges we face. It is time
to stop waiting for someone to save us. It is time to
face the truth of our situation – that we’re all in this
together, that we all have a voice – and figure out
how to mobilise the hearts and minds of everyone
in our workplaces and communities.
Why do we continue to hope for heroes? It seems
we assume certain things, including the following:
› Leaders have the answers. They know what to do.
› People do what they’re told. They just have to be
given good plans and instructions.
› High risk requires high control. As situations grow
more complex and challenging, power needs to
shift to the top (with the leaders who know what
to do).

14 January/February 2011

From Hero ... Illustration: Jane Ray
to Host
These beliefs give rise to the models of
command and control revered in organisations and
governments worldwide. Those at the bottom of the
hierarchy submit to the greater vision and expertise
of those above. Leaders promise to get us out of this
mess; we willingly surrender individual autonomy
in exchange for security.
The only predictable consequence of leaders’
attempts to wrest control of a complex, even chaotic
situation is that they create more chaos. They go into
isolation with just a few key advisers, and attempt to
find a simple solution (quickly) to a complex problem.
And people pressure them to do just that. Everyone
wants the problem to disappear; cries of “Fix it!” arise
from the public. Leaders scramble to look like they’ve
taken charge and have everything in hand.
But the causes of today’s problems are complex and
interconnected. There are no simple answers, and no
one individual can possibly know what to do. We
seem unable to acknowledge these complex realities.
Instead, when the leader fails to resolve the crisis, we
Issue 264
fire him or her, and immediately begin searching for
the next (more perfect) one. We don’t question our
expectations of leaders, we don’t ever question our
desire for heroes.
Heroic leadership rests on the illusion that
someone can be in control. Yet we live in a world of
complex systems whose very existence means they
are inherently uncontrollable. No one is in charge
of our food systems. No one is in charge of our
schools. No one is in charge of the environment.
No one is in charge of national security. No one is
in charge!
Heroic leadership rests on
the illusion that someone,
somewhere, can be in control
These systems are emergent phenomena –
the result of thousands of small, local actions
that converged to create powerful systems with
properties that may bear little or no resemblance
to the smaller actions that gave rise to them. These
are the systems that now dominate our lives; they
cannot be changed by working backwards, focusing
on only a few simple causes. And they cannot be
changed either by the boldest visions of our most
heroic leaders.
If we want to be able to get these complex systems
to work better, we need to abandon our reliance on
the ‘leader-as-hero’ and invite in the ‘leader-as-host’.
We need to support those leaders who know that
problems are complex, who know that in order to
understand the full complexity of any issue, all parts
of the system need to be invited in to participate
and contribute. We, as followers, need to give our
leaders time, patience, forgiveness; and we need to
be willing to step up and contribute.
These leaders-as-hosts are candid enough to
admit that they don’t know what to do; they realise
that it’s sheer foolishness to rely only on them for
answers. But they also know they can trust in other
people’s creativity and commitment to get the
work done. They know that other people, no matter
where they are in the organisational hierarchy, can
be as motivated, diligent and creative as the leader,
given the right invitation.
L eaders who journey from hero to host have
seen past the negative dynamics of politics and
opposition that hierarchy breeds; they’ve ignored
the organisational charts and role descriptions that
confine people’s potential. Instead, they’ve become
curious. Who’s in this organisation or community?
What skills and capacities might they offer if they
were invited into the work as full contributors?
What do they know, what insights do they have that
might lead to a solution to this problem?
15
 Leaders-as-hosts know that people willingly
support those things they’ve played a part in
creating – that you can’t expect people to ‘buy into’
plans and projects developed elsewhere. Leaders-
as-hosts invest in meaningful conversations
among people from many parts of the system as
the most productive way to engender new insights
and possibilities for action. They trust that people
are willing to contribute, and that most people
yearn to find meaning and possibility in their lives
and work. And these leaders know that hosting
others is the only way to get complex, intractable
problems solved.
Leaders-as-hosts don’t just benevolently let go
and trust that people will do good work on their
own. Leaders have a great many things to attend
to, but these are quite different than the work of
heroes. Hosting leaders must:
› provide conditions and good group processes to
enable people to work together;
› provide resources of time, the scarcest commodity
of all;
› insist that people and the system learn from
experience, frequently;
› offer unequivocal support – people know the
leader is there for them;
› keep the bureaucracy at bay, creating oases (or
bunkers) where people are less encumbered by
senseless demands for reports and administrivia;
› play defence with other leaders who want to take
back control, who are critical that people have
been given too much freedom;
› reflect back to people on a regular basis how
they’re doing, what they’re accomplishing, how
far they’ve journeyed;
› work with people to develop relevant measures of
progress to make their achievements visible; and
› value conviviality and esprit de corps – not false
‘rah-rah’ activities, but the spirit that arises in any
group that accomplishes difficult work together.
It’s important to note how leaders journeying from
hero to host use their positional power. They have
to work all levels of the hierarchy; most often, it’s
easier to gain support and respect from the people
they lead than it is to gain it from their superiors.
Most senior leaders of large hierarchies believe in
their inherent superiority, as proven by the position
they’ve attained. They don’t believe that everyday
people are as creative or self-motivated as are they.
When participation is suggested as the means
to gather insights and ideas from staff on a
complex problem, senior leaders will often block
such activities. They justify their opposition by
stating that people would use this opportunity to
take advantage of the organisation; or that they
would suggest ideas that have no bearing on the
organisation’s mission; or that people would feel
overly confident and overstep their roles. In truth,
many senior leaders view engaging the whole
16
system as a threat to their own power and control.
Leaders who do know the value of full engagement,
who do trust those they lead, have to constantly
defend their staff from senior leaders who insist
on more controls and more bureaucracy to curtail
their activities, even when those very activities are
producing excellent results. Strange to say, but too
many senior leaders are willing to risk creating more
chaos by continuing their take-charge, command-
and-control leadership.
Those who have been held back in confining
roles, who have been buried in the hierarchy, will
Hosting leaders create change by
relying on everyone’s creativity,
commitment and generosity
eventually blossom and develop in the company of
a hosting leader. Yet it takes time for employees to
believe that this boss is different, that this leader
actually wants them to contribute. It can take 12
to 18 months in systems where people have been
silenced into submission by autocratic leadership.
These days, most people take a wait-and-see
attitude, no longer interested in participating
because past invitations weren’t genuine or didn’t
engage them in meaningful work. The leader needs
to prove him- or herself by continually insisting
that work cannot be accomplished and problems
cannot be solved without the participation of
everyone. If the message is sincere and consistent,
people gradually return to life; even people who
have ‘died’ on the job, who are just waiting
until retirement, can come alive in the presence
of a leader who encourages them and creates
opportunities for them to contribute.
Leaders-as-hosts need to be skilled conveners.
They realise that their organisation or community
is rich in resources, and that the easiest way to
discover these is to bring diverse people together
in conversations that matter. People who felt
invisible, neglected, left out: these are the people
who can emerge from their boxes and labels to
become interesting, engaged colleagues and
citizens. Hosting meaningful conversations isn’t
about getting people to like each other or feel
good. It’s about creating the means for problems to
get solved, for teams to function well, for people
to become energetic activists.
Hosting leaders create substantive change by
relying on everyone’s creativity, commitment
and generosity. They learn from first-hand
experience that these qualities are present in just
about everyone and in every organisation. They
extend sincere invitations, ask good questions,
and have the courage to support risk-taking and
experimentation.
January/February 2011

M any of us can get caught up acting like heroes
– not from power drives, but from our good
intentions and desires to help. Are you acting as a
hero? Here’s how to know. You’re acting as a hero
when you believe that if you just work harder, you’ll
fix things; that if you just get smarter or learn a
new technique, you’ll be able to solve problems for
others. You’re acting as a hero if you take on more
and more projects and causes and have less time for
relationships. You’re playing the hero if you believe
that you can save the situation, the person, the world.
Our heroic impulses most often are born from the
best of intentions. We want to help, we want to solve,
we want to fix. Yet this is the illusion of specialness –
that we are the only ones who can offer help, service,
skills. If we don’t do it, nobody will. This hero’s path
has only one guaranteed destination: we end up
Issue 264
All illustrations: Jane Ray www.janeray.com
feeling lonely, exhausted and unappreciated.
It is time for all us heroes to go home because,
if we do, we’ll notice that we’re not alone. We’re
surrounded by people just like us. They too want
to contribute, they too have ideas, they want to be
useful to others and solve their own problems.
If the truth be told, they never wanted heroes to
rescue them anyway.
Margaret Wheatley (www.margaretwheatley.com) is a
writer and co-founder of The Berkana Institute (www.
berkana.org), a charitable foundation that strengthens
communities by harnessing the wisdom already present
in their people, traditions and environment. This article
contains excerpts from Walk Out Walk On:A Learning Journey into
Communities Daring to Live the Future Now by Margaret Wheatley
& Deborah Frieze (published by Berrett-Koehler).
17
LEA D E R S H I P  E N V I RO N M E N TAL LEADERSHIP
Inspiring Leadership
Environmental leaders should combine hope
for the future of this Earth with a commitment
to the flourishing of each person, creature and
place, writes Dave Bookless
R
eaders of Resurgence may be surprised to find an
article on environmental leadership written by a
Church of England minister. This is double whammy
territory. Surely Christianity is responsible both for
an anthropocentric understanding of human domination
that has wrought havoc on the planet, and for a hierarchical,
authoritarian model of leadership? Guilty on both counts,
although that guilt is shared, of course, by a range of other
secular and religious worldviews. I’m not setting out here
to defend the historical record of the churches but rather to
suggest there is another Christian tradition, older and wiser,
often resonating with the insights shared by Indigenous
cultures around the world.
My own experience has been heavily shaped by involvement
in A Rocha, a movement of Christian conservation bodies now
in over 20 countries across six continents. A Rocha (Portuguese
for ‘The Rock’) has grown organically from a single project
established in the early 1980s to study and protect a threatened
estuary habitat on the Portuguese Algarve to now having global
influence. Its growth has come, not through being well-funded
or powerfully connected, but through inspiration, example
and flexibility.
I first came across A Rocha in the early 1990s when training
for the Church of England ministry. I had undergone a rapid
period of environmental ‘conversion’, triggered by my attempts
to dispose of waste when on a beautiful island holiday and
then further shaped by re-reading the Bible and asking how
God felt about planet Earth. And in seeking out other Christians
on a similar path, I heard about A Rocha.
My wife, Anne, and I visited and were bowled over, not only
by the excellent scientific conservation work, but also by the
holistic atmosphere of community, hospitality and welcome.
Here was leadership characterised not by a drive to achieve
results, but by openness to all and a vision wide enough to
encompass people and the rest of Nature.
My experience of leadership was further shaped by
becoming vicar of a multiracial urban church in Southall,
London. The church was small and threatened with closure, its
18
members divided and lacking in confidence. They thought they
wanted strong leadership. Instead they got me – inexperienced,
mourning a lost baby and caring for a wheelchair-bound wife.
To my surprise, my weakness and vulnerability became a
catalyst for others to grow in confidence and unity, as church
members rallied round to decorate, cook, and take on greater
responsibilities.
Although I enjoyed church leadership, the A Rocha vision
wouldn’t go away and became linked to a sense that many
urban problems I could see around Southall stemmed from
alienation from Nature. Slowly a vision emerged of an ‘urban’
A Rocha, adapting the inspirational example of Portugal to
multicultural West London. So in early 2001 I left my beloved
Leadership is not about the
individual but the community
parish to set up A Rocha UK, with an initial focus on seeking
to restore Minet Tip – 90 acres of council-owned open space
between Southall and Hayes.
Things moved very quickly and I entered a steep learning curve
of negotiations with the local council and other statutory and
community groups, encountering new vocabularies of urban
regeneration, community cohesion, ecological surveys and
fund-raising. It was an incredibly busy, stressful, exciting time,
and in just three years Minet moved from being a place of illegal
fly-tipping and a dump for burnt-out cars into a re-landscaped,
replanted country park, and A Rocha UK grew from zero to a
staff team of eight. Along the way I made plenty of mistakes,
some from inexperience, some from insecurity, and some from
focusing so tightly on my own understanding of the vision and
goal ahead that I neglected people around me. Leadership, I
learned the hard way, is deeply flawed if results become more
important than people and if leaders stop listening.
Despite many mistakes, the Minet project grew and A Rocha
developed elsewhere around the UK, forming partnerships,
establishing local projects, producing resources for churches,
January/February 2011

Noah’s Ark by Brian Whelan others during a time of economic turmoil; by Noah,
Image: © Brian Whelan 2010, courtesy Sacred Space Gallery www.sacredspacegallery.com
and expanding rapidly through employed and volunteer staff.
Another important leadership lesson I learned was that of
recognising my own gifts and limits. I realised, for example,
that my own passion was less about running a growing
organisation, and more about sharing a vision through writing,
speaking and living it out.
My understanding of leadership comes from four main
sources: the cultures that have shaped me, the examples of
inspiring individuals, the wisdom I perceive in Nature, and the
Christian scriptures that are my foundation.
Culturally, I have been shaped by both West and East. I was
born in India and lived there until I was 10, but my family is
English. Since moving to the UK I have been through the British
school and university systems but have lived almost entirely in
majority South Asian communities in Bradford, West Yorkshire,
and Southall. From the Western tradition, I have absorbed that
leadership should be clear, decisive and results-orientated.
None of that is wrong, but it is not the whole story. From
Indian culture, I find that leadership is not about the individual
but about the community. Its purpose can never be about the
leader’s ego or solely achieving profit for shareholders. There is
always a wider social dimension.
Issue 264
Individually, I have been inspired by historic
Christian leaders such as Francis of Assisi, who
gave up privilege and wealth, embraced the whole
created order, and reached out to Muslims in love at
the time of the Crusades, as well as by Indian leaders
including Gandhi, Tagore and Sadhu Sundar Singh.
I’ve also had the privilege of seeing A Rocha’s core
values being carried out by different but inspiring
personalities in widely varying cultures. Whether
the issue is protecting a Middle Eastern marsh
whilst negotiating the complexities of Lebanese
culture, or mitigating human–elephant conflict on
the outskirts of Bangalore, I have observed similar
leadership traits. These include deep cross-cultural
listening, inclusive commitment to people and
wildlife, a long-term immersion in partnership
with all who share the same aims, and a sense
of wider perspective that will help cope with
disappointments.
From Nature, I see vital lessons that our often
synthetic leadership manuals need to assimilate. The
greatest is interdependence: that we as individuals
and as humanity are utterly dependent on healthy,
balanced ecosystems. There is no leadership outside
the context that shapes and legitimises it. Nature has
also taught me lessons of patience (growth is slow
in fruitful trees), and of the need for sensitivity
to natural rhythms and seasons. I seek to observe
the flowers and the birds in order to learn about
provision, trust and dependence.
In the Bible, as elsewhere, great leaders tell stories
and are defined by their life stories. I am inspired by
Joseph, rising from prejudice and prison to provide
sustainable food not just for his own nation but for
showing unpopular leadership when all seemed
well, and committed to a vision of biodiversity
conservation in an age of climate change. And of
course by Jesus, the servant-leader, the one who
modelled what he taught, who took time apart
in Nature and with God to gain perspective, who
told timelessly haunting stories with ever-fresh
meanings, who transformed a motley band of
unlikely leadership material into a world-changing
movement, and who made the ultimate sacrifice.
So what is the true purpose of leadership?
In a time of leadership crisis within the
environmental movement, perhaps it is simply this:
to combine a hope-filled vision for the future of this
Earth with a locally rooted commitment to pouring
yourself out for the flourishing of each person, each
creature and each place.
As somebody once said, “Anyone who holds on
to life just as it is destroys that life. But if you let it
go, reckless in your love, you’ll have it forever, real
and eternal.”
Dave Bookless is the author of God Doesn’t Do Waste: Redeeming
the Whole of Life and Planetwise: Dare to Care for God’s World. For
further information visit www.arocha.org
19
LEA D E R S H I P  C O M M U N I C ATION
Peace and Love, by Trevor Price
The Power of Language
The words a leader chooses are just as critical
as their actions, writes Thomas Moore
A
s a writer and psychotherapist, I have
been using words carefully most of my
life. While counselling a husband and
wife, I notice that a single word can stir
their emotions and take their conversation to a dark
place they both know is negative.
If, for example, I use a word like ‘neurotic’ or even
‘troubled’ in talking to a client about his situation,
he may feel judged and become defensive. On the
other hand, a few honest words of appreciation can
put a marriage back on track.
Words don’t just convey meaning: they are a force.
We live at a time when people are generally
pragmatic. We want to be effective and we don’t
20
Image: © Trevor Price www.trevorprice.co.uk
care much about the words we use. We see signs
of this carelessness in advertising, where grammar
and spelling are secondary to perkiness and brevity.
People drink lite sodas and are purchasing new tech
(technology) for their business offices, and apps
(applications) for their telephones.
Of course language evolves, but you can usually
sense the difference between evolution and neglect.
Smoothing out a word like ‘light’ into ‘lite’, we lose
its history and associations.The word ultimately goes
back to leukos in Greek and is related to leukaemia,
a problem of white blood cells. We don’t sound the
‘gh’, but its presence there keeps the memory of the
Greek associations.
January/February 2011
 In my own writing I try to find a midpoint
between pedanticism and love of language. I know
what I’m talking about, because I was once fired
from a teaching position at a university in part
because I didn’t write in acceptable academic style.
Apparently, my words didn’t have sufficient or
appropriate gravitas.
A Rumi story tells of a dervish walking past a
deep well. He hears a voice:
“Help. I’m a writer and I’m stuck down here.”
The dervish says, “I’ll go find out where a ladder’s at.”
“Your grammar’s atrocious,” the writer shouts up.
“Well, then, you’ll have to wait there until my
grammar improves,” the dervish says, and walks on.
I feel like the writer in the well waiting for
grammar to improve. And not just grammar. I
understand the Sufi complaint about being too fussy
The bland and bloated language of
politics blocks the opportunity for
leaders to truly inspire and educate
about rules of speech. I’m waiting, too, for a love of
language to return, an appreciation for the words
we use and for style and grace in expression. Like
the writer in the well, I could be in for a long wait.
World leaders often use diplomatic language
that hides the real meaning of the words,
creating euphemisms that are outright dangerous.
Describing slaughtered and maimed civilians as
“collateral damage” is the classic example for our
times, and it’s cynical in the extreme. “Enhanced
interrogation techniques” for ‘torture’ seems part
of the cruelty.
The bland and bloated language of politics blocks
the opportunity for leaders to truly inspire and
educate. Imagine hearing instead a thoughtful,
measured analysis of the world situation from
a leader, accompanied by intelligent, subtle
solutions to problems. Instead, we get the tired and
unimaginative language of war and militancy. Wars
begin with words, so we should be careful how we
speak, especially to nations where there is tension.
Our words can heal the situation before the military
takes up its weapons.
We could all have a rule that we won’t use words
that come to us unconsciously and out of habit or
that are in the common parlance of public discourse.
Fresh words could help us arrive at fresh ideas, for
there is an intimate connection between thought and
word. Careful use of words requires careful thinking.
Sometimes I wonder if the language of progressive
movements gets in the way of the message. I, for
one, always stumble at the word ‘sustainability’.
When I think about it, I know what it means, but
it doesn’t feel like a friendly word. I’d rather talk
about not being wasteful, or about using resources
carefully and wisely. ‘Environmentalism’ isn’t such
Issue 264
a friendly word either. Maybe we need a new, simple word or
phrase – ‘care for the world’.
World peace begins with peace in the family. As a therapist,
I’ve heard many adults recite hurtful words they heard decades
ago from a parent or sibling. Care in speaking to children
requires a degree of self-possession, the ability to see past the
blind emotion of the moment to the needs of the child. Good
words come from that greater vision.
For example, words of extreme praise can do wonders for
the injured ego of a child or spouse. Sometimes it’s helpful to
give words to what is usually left unspoken. “I appreciate what
you did for me. I’m happy that you’re with me.” Simple, direct
and felt words of praise, appreciation and gratitude often go
unsaid, when they could be a handy means of healing. Words
hurt and words heal.
Every day offers opportunities to say words of encouragement
and recognition. No matter how strong or successful we are,
we all need such words. But often they may seem unnecessary.
My rule is: if the thought occurs to me to say something
supportive, I say it. You can never speak too often in praise and
appreciation. You can also receive that praise, when it comes,
gracefully – with words. “Thank you for saying that. I need to
hear that.”
A friend of our family, an intelligent, progressive Catholic
priest, always praises our children to the skies. He is extravagant
in his language, and everyone knows he overdoes it with his
praise. But we all love to see him, and we treasure his friendship.
We don’t need realism and moderation from such a friend.
Everywhere today marriage partners and children are in
distress. I have no doubt that one simple solution would be to
offer them words of support. When used with care, language
can be therapeutic. Even, and maybe especially, when a person
is being difficult and belligerent, words of understanding and
affirmation, realistic and felt, can often help.
Years ago I was trained as a counsellor according to Carl
Rogers’ method. He advised using simple words that let
a person know he is heard and understood. On paper such
words sound stiff: “I really hear what you’re saying. You’re tired
of speaking without being heard.” But if you mean what you
say, your plain words can have immense power. The simple
Rogerian method could help many a troubled relationship and
many a spluttering politician.
As a therapist, I’m aware that ‘talk therapy’ has a poor
reputation in places where a materialistic philosophy of drug
treatments and behaviour management is strong. This turn
away from the power of spoken interaction is part of the larger
myth of our time: the enthronement of a materialistic and
mechanistic world. But I still believe in the power of language,
its capacity to hurt and to heal.
Our physical world is polluted with dangerous chemicals,
but our language, too, suffers its own kind of pollution. This
is an ecological problem that we can solve in our personal
lives by learning about language and using it with care and
imagination. The flow of our words could be as clear and
fresh as the cascade of an unpolluted, free-flowing stream. We
could then choose our words the way we plant a garden –
thoughtfully and with an eye to beauty.
Thomas Moore is is former Catholic monk and author of many books
including Care of the Soul and Original Self.
21
LEA D E R S H I P  T R A I N I N G
One Planet Leaders
Developing business leaders with more awareness of their
responsibilities towards the planet will require a new kind
of leadership training. Jonathan Gosling and Jean-Paul
Jeanrenaud explain the thinking behind one such course
B
erlin, summer 2010: A summit meeting of
corporate leaders, with a keynote from Narayan
Murthy, founder and President of Infosys, the
Indian software services company that now
challenges market leaders IBM, Fujitsu and Accenture.
Murthy stresses the importance of reconfiguring how our
economies work, calling on corporations to set an agenda
and pace for change that governments will follow. This
message is underscored by the CEOs of Wipro, Deutsche
Telecom, the Bundesbank, Saint-Gobain and Lufthansa.
The fact is, business leaders get it – but their businesses
are not changing fast enough, and if they really do want
to push governments towards systemic reform of world
trade and regulation, they are failing. Why?
There was a clue during the breakout sessions of the
same summit meeting, where company managers and
business professors discussed practical steps to take.
Time and again they struggled with the language of
sustainability; and never far away was the idea that
sustainability means, first and foremost, the ability to
maintain the business, its employees, and its returns to
shareholders. To seriously contemplate anything other
than ‘business as usual’ is clearly just too difficult for
those responsible (and held accountable) for producing
the goods and services on which we all depend.
Leadership, it is clear, is important, but it is not enough.
Somehow we have to develop the will and the skill to
change the way we do business, right at the managerial
heart of it.
Over the past few decades, the corporate footprint
has changed in size, impact and nature in response to
ever-evolving market conditions. In the early years of
industrialisation, most companies were operating in
local markets and meeting the needs and expectations of
local stakeholders. At this scale they retained a tangible
connection to the communities in which they were
based, and had a relatively small impact on biodiversity
and the environment.
In 1960, the richest 20% of the world’s population
22
accounted for 70% of global GDP, while the poorest 20%
controlled 2.3% – a ratio of 30:1. By 2005, the richest
20% controlled 85% of GDP, while the poorest 20%
accounted for only 1.1% – a ratio of 80:1. What we see
in reality is the gap between rich and poor widening and,
globally, a rise in violence in response to growing inequity.
The have-nots also want what the haves have. And, in
our view, all sectors of society, including corporations,
have a collective responsibility to reverse these trends of
environmental degradation and social breakdown.
As Henry Mintzberg recently wrote in the Financial Times,
“Corporations are social institutions: if they don’t serve
society, they have no business existing”.
Alongside this widespread feeling that business has a
responsibility towards society that it has yet to fulfil, it is
worth noting that companies’ perceptions of their own
relationships to society as a whole are evolving. This is
an encouraging change, and certainly in WWF we are
fortunate to be working with pioneering companies
(including IKEA and Nokia) who have all made a strong
commitment to reducing their corporate footprint and
operating sustainably.
These leading corporations are partnering with WWF to
establish and meet ambitious targets to voluntarily reduce
their greenhouse-gas emissions, aiming to collectively cut
carbon emissions by some 14 million tons annually – the
equivalent of taking more than three million cars off the
road every year. By increasing efficiency, they are saving
hundreds of millions of dollars and proving again that
protecting the environment makes good business sense.
So where will the leaders come from, to make these
extraordinary changes?
WWF has been working on this for several years via
a short-course corporate programme called One Planet
Leaders, which, in spite of its proven success, was failing
to reach enough people to make any real difference.
As a result, in the summer of 2009 we asked ourselves:
“How can we have a systemic impact on the training and
education of managers, so that it becomes perfectly normal
January/February 2011

Primavera by Alberto Ruggieri Image: © Alberto Ruggieri
Where will we for leaders to approach business on the assumption
find the leaders that we have only one planet on which to live?”
This is the task we set ourselves, when we came
to make the up with the idea of the One Planet MBA: a Master
changes we need? of Business Administration course designed and
taught on the assumption that we must find ways
to grow and prosper with the wonderful resources
that Nature gives us. We understood this had to be
a credible business training and therefore as much
about business action as about administration.
Earlier we suggested that leadership is not enough
on its own; but let’s be more precise. Inspired and
inspiring leadership is crucial and we do indeed
need managers who are able to inspire, and to
respond to the leadership of others. They should
also be well informed, and not too easily carried
away by an alluring vision. They actually need to
be able to resist leadership, to pause and think, to
Issue 264
collaborate with others, to seek guidance
and to listen for it in unexpected places.
And of course we expect managers to be
technically competent to analyse data,
direct operations, balance priorities,
husband resources and make enough
money to sustain the business.
It’s a tough job, and as we know from
many studies around the world, leaders
are pulled in so many different directions
that they seldom have time to consider
any one subject for longer than a few
minutes, and must react to events at least
as much as initiate them. If we hold to
an image of the coolly rational controller,
or the omniscient strategist, we are
referring to the analyst and planner, not
the manager: real management is messy,
relentless and interdependent.
For our course, we have identified
three pedagogic tasks: to teach skills
and techniques; to form a sophisticated
and discursive understanding of the
challenges facing the planet, people and
businesses; and to enhance individual
and collective abilities to determine
what matters and manage appropriate
changes. (We emphasise the collective in
the third category because no one does
it alone, and we aim to grow a coalition
of business schools, companies, NGOs
and individuals, linking with the WWF
‘climate savers’.)
In order to be able to change the
One Planet MBA whilst it is actually
running, we recruited an ‘innovation
cohort’ of 40 people (equal numbers
of men and women) from 22 countries
to spend a year in Exeter learning about
the emerging models for business,
contributing perspectives from their
own communities and experiences, and
honing their skills for taking action.
The underlying programme philosophy
is that we all share responsibility both for
the issues and for the required change
towards operating businesses within the
ecological limits of our one planet. If we
take up this challenge, the new paradigm
that emerges will be a true expression
of a transformed way of being, based
on compassion and understanding, and
founded on mutual respect.
Jonathan Gosling is Professor of Leadership
at the University of Exeter Business School
in Devon, UK and co-founder of the One
Planet MBA. Jean-Paul Jeanrenaud is Director
of Corporate Relations at WWF-International,
and co-founder of the One Planet MBA.
23
LEA D E R S H I P I N P R AC T I C E  MAASAI LEADERSHIP

Leadership is supposed to be for everyone,

so every child or every person is supposed
to act like a leader; so you should lead your
own family, you should lead your own life.
As a child grows, he’s given responsibility of
taking care of the lambs, the goats, the sheep,
so he’s shown that he’s responsible. When
he grows up more he becomes a warrior.
We are initiated to become warriors and we
then go to the bush for training: training to be
leaders, training how to take our community
forward, how to protect our community and
all that wisdom.
To become a respected leader in the Maasai
community, you have to first of all to show a
good example.
When you are a leader you should respect
everybody; you should respect children, the
whole community. You don’t go bullying
people, you don’t tell people ‘do this’,
commanding people, no.
Instead you have respect.
– Emmanuel Manjura, Maasai Leader

Shilluk tribespeople gathered under a tree in the shade for story-telling, Sudan

24 January/February 2011
 Photo: © Ivan Strasburg/Eye Ubiquitous/Hutchison

Issue 264 25
LEA D E R S H I P I N P R AC T I C E  HRH THE PRINCE OF WALES
The Making of Harmony
Ian Skelly is inspired by the vision of harmony
fearlessly promoted by the Prince of Wales
T
he Prince of Wales is no stranger to the foolery
of the media. Some of it has always been done
out of ignorance, but plenty more spreads
misunderstanding deliberately. And it has a long
history. Back in 1980, for instance, The Guardian newspaper
gleefully reported that he had installed what they called
“a strange machine” at Buckingham Palace – another of
his mad ideas that would never catch on. That strange
device was called a bottle bank.
The Prince told me this story as we walked a remote
stretch of coastline at the very tip of North East Scotland.
We had just completed a book, Harmony, co-authored by
the Prince, me and the environmentalist Tony Juniper
and part of a two-year project, including a film of the
same name, designed to explain in simple terms the
key principles that underpin all of the many projects
and enterprises the Prince has so far created since the
unveiling of that strange machine.
We were discussing
‘Harmony’ refers to an how the book and the
film would likely be
active state of balanced, received.
ordered interaction True, many now
acknowledge that,
back then, the Prince was far-sighted, not to say brave
in challenging the monumental tide of thought against
him, but few today see what has become so clear to me
and others who know him – namely, that he remains
resolutely so.
For example, during our walk across an isolated part of
Scotland, the Prince was greatly exercised by the impact a
brand-new green industry will have on the hard-pressed
community there. So much so, that earlier in the day he
had attended a workshop at the Castle of Mey, convened by
his Foundation for the Built Environment. It had brought
together representatives from local communities, NGOs and
many important government agencies to consider how they
might best manage the development of the new tidal- and
wave-power industry trying to find its feet in that part of
the world and, in particular, how the infrastructure on land,
designed to support the turbines offshore, will affect the
wellbeing of local communities.
The danger is all too common, he explained. It will be
26
very easy, not to say much cheaper in the short term, to
house the plant in factory-processed concrete bunkers, but
that will turn the landscape into an unattractive moonscape,
which will seriously erode the area’s capacity to attract
tourists. If, though, the buildings are made to blend with
the landscape by being built with local materials and
according to traditional designs (that also better suit the
harsh conditions of the region) then not only will this new
technology help produce plenty of clean energy, it may
even enhance the area and improve the wellbeing of those
communities. He wanted to get the point across that this
should matter to a power company because all businesses
operate within communities. They have a responsibility to
enrich the community, not fragment it.
This is a thread that runs right through our book and
film: the notion of creating the sorts of ‘virtuous circle’
that Nature relies upon for her resilience. Too often,
through short-term concerns and an overly mechanistic
response, the outcome is the reverse: a vicious circle. If
all you do is concentrate on the one desired outcome –
in this case the need for buildings to house an electrical
plant – then, although you solve that one problem, you
inadvertently create many more. And there are plenty of
much more severe examples in the book.
In farming, for instance, mechanistic thinking achieves
astonishing efficiencies from the soil, for a while, but it
spawns all manner of other problems: water companies
have to spend hundreds of millions of pounds a year
cleaning the water of pollutants; dead zones in estuaries
and coastal waters disrupt entire ecosystems; water
tables drop drastically; major rivers are diverted for
extra irrigation and never reach the sea; and so on and,
depressingly, so on again.
This is why the Prince insisted that our book chart the
rise to predominance in the 20th and 21st centuries of
this kind of thinking. Not that it is wrong or unnatural.
Mechanistic thinking has always been a powerful
instrument in humanity’s toolbox, but the Prince would
have us ask what happened to make it the only tool we
now feel it is right to use.
He knows that this will prompt the old accusation that
he is ‘anti-science’. And once again, it will be alleged that
he considers himself “an enemy of the Enlightenment”.
January/February 2011
In other words, yet more deliberate foolery by certain
powerful elements within the media.
For what it is worth, in my experience the Prince is not
and never has been ‘anti-science’. Indeed, for many years
now, he has pinned his entire reputation on the evidence
of science. He has given his very public backing to the
rigorously tested findings that show how two centuries
of human industrialisation have accelerated global
warming to such a dangerous degree. And only the very
week before our walk in Scotland he addressed a business
conference there, pointing out what such science tells us:
that for every dollar of wealth we now make we produce
770 grams of CO2, a figure that needs to drop to just six
grams by 2050 if we hope to meet any of the necessary
reduction targets our science has set us.
And from then on we will probably have to be taking
carbon out of the atmosphere for every dollar of wealth
we produce. That is hardly being ‘anti-science’. As for him
calling himself “an enemy of the Enlightenment”, the fact
Ancient Harmony, 1925, by Paul Klee Image: Kunstmuseum, Basel/© DACS/The Bridgeman Art Library
Issue 264
is that he was accused of this by an economics journalist
who then retracted it, admitting he had been wrong. So
the Prince never said it of himself and yet, and perhaps
knowingly, it is now reported widely by every journalist as
fact that this is a self-imposed title.
It is certainly the case that the Prince is ‘anti’ many of
the uses to which some of our cutting-edge science is put,
often because of the agenda that lies behind the research.
In other words, who is paying the piper. It concerns him
greatly that this leads to less precaution, particularly when
we manipulate something as absolutely critical to human
civilisation as the make-up of the world’s grasses and grain.
So, no, he is not ‘anti-science’, but, yes, he is concerned
about the kind of science that, because of the particular
course our cultural approach to Nature has taken, too readily
eliminates the fact of our interconnectedness with Nature’s
systems, which includes the realm beyond the material. That
is, we do things very knowledgeably but not as consciously
as we might. As the Prince never tires of pointing out,
27

Nature is self-sustaining
by being self-limiting
Small picture of fir trees, 1922, by Paul Klee
Image: Offentliche Kunstsammlung, Basel/© DACS/The Bridgeman Art Library
technology alone will not overcome the many
challenges we now face, because technology has not
caused the problems. That fault lies squarely within the
mindset that drives it, and this is a key message being
delivered in Harmony.
For every good reason the mechanistic outlook
sought one beneficial outcome, but inadvertently
produced another. It thought it was building an Age
of Convenience, but it was also engineering a far more
worrying Age of Disconnection. Our industrialised
approach has severed our deep connection with Nature
by seeing the Earth as a cold and separated utility.
Thus, our natural sense of the sacred is confidently
brushed aside by the logic of what has become
a secularised, instrumental relationship with the
Earth that sees her precious capital reserves as
nothing more than resources. Only by claiming to
be “knowledgeable” can we fudge the inconvenient
truth that we are now eroding Nature’s capital so
severely, even though we know in our hearts that we
are living beyond her means.
So, although not an enemy of it, perhaps the
28
Prince is right to suggest that we should take stock
of the pros and cons of an attitude that was certainly
enshrined in the Age of Enlightenment. That is not
to say that the founding fathers were wrong but,
after 200 years, that it might be enlightened of us
to review whether an approach so dominated by a
purely mechanistic outlook is still fit for purpose in
our very different circumstances.
Clearly our present approach is floundering. As
rainforests continue to be cleared at such a rate that
we will soon suffer a worrying loss of rainfall, as
fisheries are plundered to the point of collapse and
as greenhouse-gas emissions spiral ever upwards,
the only response our mechanistic outlook seems
able to come up with is the pursuit of yet more
economic ‘growth’.
Harmony suggests how else we might approach
things. There are many vivid examples, but at the
heart of the book and the film lies the same graphic
demonstration of how Nature operates; indeed,
how the universe does too. The Prince wanted to
make it clear that there is, astonishingly, an essential
patterning at work in all of Nature’s processes: what
he calls the “grammar of harmony”. This patterning
was embedded in the art and architecture of many
great civilisations of the world and, by drawing on
those as illustrations, he wanted to show that, far
from being a wishy-washy term, ‘harmony’ refers
to an active state of balanced, ordered interaction,
which is why he defines ‘harmony’ as “diversity
within unity”.
This exposes a very important fact of life – a
principle that should, perhaps, be better expressed
in our education system: that, in order for there
to be unity, there have to be limits on the way the
diversity behaves. And here, for me, is the most
fascinating aspect of the proposition. These limits
are self-imposed upon Nature by the very geometry
of the patterning itself. Nature is self-sustaining by
being self-limiting and, as the Prince wanted to
show, this is because she operates according to a
cyclical economy and cyclical processes.
When I studied how circles underpin so much of
the geometry of life (and that of all the world’s great
sacred architecture), I came to see that a circle is, in
effect, a straight line limited by the pull of its central
axis. I began to muse that it’s as if that central point,
the ‘source’, insists upon the straight line being
mindful of where it comes from. And so the straight
line has to compromise its desire to head off on its
own tangent.
Fanciful ideas, perhaps, after looking at too many
circles for far too long, but when you think about
it, isn’t that how Nature operates? Her central
purpose makes the same, self-sustaining demands
January/February 2011
of compromise upon her outer forms – which is not the way
we have come to operate. Our mechanistic-based culture
persuades us that, somehow, we can travel off tangentially in
a straight line; that we can stand apart from Nature’s patterns
and processes and remain immune to her necessary limits; that
we can do all of this without the balance of Nature’s sustaining
systems suffering any form of ‘dis-ease’.
The truth is that, for these complex systems to sustain us,
we also have to sustain her. It is an integrated, interactive
process. We must operate in synchrony with the grammar of
life’s patterning in order to serve the coherence of the whole.
This also explains why I found that the Prince takes a slightly
different view to that oft-quoted idea in environmentalism. To
say “we are a part of Nature not apart from it” could be seen
as remaining within the mechanistic model. It suggests that
life on Earth is a device, constituted of a series of parts. Yet the
most recent studies in astrophysics serve to support what many
ancient sages freely taught: that it would be far more precise to
say that we are Nature.
Not only do we inhabit the universe, but the universe
inhabits us. There are no parts, as such: everything contains
the whole, just as the whole contains its teeming diversity. And
this is why we have to recognise that what we do to the Earth
is intimately fused with what we do to ourselves. If we fail the
Earth, we fail humanity.
As we walked those empty cliff-tops some 700 miles from
Fleet Street, the Prince predicted that every monster in the
box would come leaping from its lair when this book was
published. I asked him if this daunted him, but he was quick to
say no. There is too much to do and the situation is too urgent
for the personal impact of such attacks to get in the way. He
“This hour in history needs a dedicated circle of
transformed non-conformists...The saving of our
world from pending doom will come, not through
the complacent adjustment of the conforming
majority, but through the creative maladjustment
of a nonconforming minority... Human salvation
lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted.”
Issue 264
told me that a very long time ago he had decided that if nobody
else had the guts to stand up and say what needs to be said,
then it had to be him. As a result, of course, he has had to face
many corrosive and often deliberately misinformed attacks.
What is more, the unique paradox of his position means that
he has had to sit on his hands and endure them.
Having seen him at work at such close quarters and in
so many situations, I have to say that anyone without his
astonishing stamina would have buckled under the strain of
this a long time ago, but his dedication to what he sees as his
duty is absolutely resolute. As he put it to me, although one
day he may become Defender of the Faith, he sees it as his duty
now, to both society and the soil, to be the defender of Nature.
The thought of those impending media storms contrasted
sharply with the scene around us. A bright blue sky made the
waters across to Orkney look positively Mediterranean. They were
calm, glass clear and turquoise. As we walked, the Prince told me
he takes great courage from Gandhi’s observation of how the
journey tends to go. “First they ignore you,” he said. “Then they
laugh at you.” He gave me a conspiratorial look out of the corner
of his eye as he continued. “Then they fight you. Then you win.”
On the basis of all we now know, I am afraid that for the sake
of the Earth, we will have to win. And after all I have seen him
do, and knowing now how much of his life he has committed to
Nature’s cause, for the sake of the Prince, I pray we do.
The book Harmony, by HRH The Prince of Wales, Ian Skelly and Tony
Juniper, is published worldwide by HarperCollins. The film is made
by Balcony Films for NBC and then for worldwide release. Ian Skelly
has been its script adviser on behalf of the Prince and an associate
producer. He is a broadcaster, writer and presenter for BBC Radio 3.
– Martin Luther King, Jr.
29
LEA D E R S H I P I N P R AC T I C E  NEW GENERATION

Drawing a Door by Astrid Dininno © Images.com/Corbis

30 January/February 2011
 Leaders as Dreamers
Often branded ‘the leaders of tomorrow’, young people
around the globe are already leading, inspiring, and ‘walking
the talk’. Elizabeth Wainwright meets some of them
A
t a time when global financial
systems are failing, peak oil has
been reached, environmental
disasters seem a weekly occurrence
and people are questioning the ‘business as
usual’ leadership paradigm, there are change-
makers from the new generation who are
rolling up their sleeves and taking action to
literally change the world.
Undeterred by the barrage of stories of doom
and gloom, these people are already turning
ideas into action and, through this passion and
commitment, inspiring leadership, belief and
enthusiasm in others.
From the Cordillera in the northern
Philippines, Jennifer Awingan is a young
Igorot leader who coordinates the Asia Pacific
Indigenous Youth Network (APIYN), which
mobilises Indigenous youth for the promotion
and protection of Indigenous peoples’ rights to
self-governance, ancestral land, cultural integrity
and socio-economic development that is, most
importantly, consistent with their values.
“A leader should be a dreamer,” she says.
“Leadership is about being part of a movement
and a struggle. Leaders can be individuals or
whole groups.”
Since 1990, Jennifer has helped to re-
establish the Progressive Igorots for Social
Action, and also works with the Cordillera
People’s Alliance Youth Center: “I am trying
to develop the kind of leadership I believe
in,” she says. “Leadership should keep hold
of identity, but promote harmonious living
between tribes. When there are boundaries,
there is only chaos.”
Jennifer also played an active role in the
organising and running of the Asia Pacific
Climate Youth Camp in the Philippines last
November: a lesser-known Indigenous antidote
to the media-frenzied but apparently fruitless
top-level Copenhagen talks of the previous
year. “The number of Indigenous peoples’
movements across the globe is growing,” she
explains. “Global leadership has to take this
into account. It must be participatory. And it
must involve the new generation.”
Kelvin Cheung is founder of Foodcycle,
Issue 264
which brings together young volunteers,
surplus food and free kitchen space to
simultaneously tackle waste and poverty in
Britain. Foodcycle helps volunteers set up an
operational structure that will allow them
to collect, cook and deliver food to various
beneficiaries every week.
Kelvin talks about what defines him and
motivates him, saying that he is a ‘doer’, and
someone who channels his energy into solving
a problem, not moaning about it. “How can
food poverty and food waste happen side by
side, on the same street?” he asks, adding, “We
really are going to be the change we want to
see in this world.”
In Kibera, the slums that surround Kenya’s
sprawling capital, Nairobi, Salim Mohamed
“You can be a servant, and a
leader at the same time”
– Salim Mohamed,
TED Conference Africa Fellow for 2007
co-founded and served for eight years as
executive director of Carolina for Kibera, which
fights abject poverty and helps prevent violence
through community-based development.
“A leader is a change-maker,” Salim says, and
this defines him well. At just 16, he became
involved in the development of the largest youth
sports programme in Africa. Subsequently,
the British Council has twice employed Salim
as a consultant to help launch youth sports
programmes in Ghana and Nigeria.
In 2002, Salim was nominated to serve on
the Diversity for Peace Advisory Board with
various Nobel Peace Laureates. He was selected
as a TED Conference Africa Fellow for 2007.
“Leadership has several forms,” he says. “You
can be a servant, and a leader at the same time.
But whatever kind of leader you are, you have to
care. You have to be able to communicate.”
Elizabeth Wainwright is Resurgence magazine’s Deputy
Editor. Read our interviews with Jennifer, Kelvin,
Salim and others at www.resurgence.org
31
LEA D E R S H I P I N P R AC T I C E  SOCIAL ENTREPRENEUR: TIM SMIT
Maverick Leadership
The outspoken Eden Project founder,
Tim Smit, tells Susan Clark the time is ripe
for radical new leadership that inspires
belief and a commitment to real change
I
f you like your environmental messages delivered
with a bowl of muesli and prefer pussyfooting to
telling it like it is, then the blunt style of delivery
favoured by Eden Project founder Tim Smit is not
going to be to your liking. That said, you can also expect
an energetic and impassioned discussion – both qualities
deemed to be prerequisite if you really do want leaders
with the ability to inspire others.
Having agreed to an interview based on where he
believes the environment movement needs to be heading
– “down the toilet, hopefully” was the precise phrase
he used, making pretty short shrift of that particular
topic – it was clear when reading back the transcript of
our discussion that here is someone who has an innate
understanding of the qualities that inspire belief in and a
commitment to real change.
When, for example, he set about delivering the Eden
Project message to the masses, he had already rejected the
idea of adopting the worthy tones of scientific discourse
in favour of something more akin to The Simpsons. And
he was not wrong, because according to a recent survey
of visitors by the Natural History Museum, 87% of those
The role of curiosity in inspiring
leadership is critical
questioned had no clue what the term ‘biodiversity’ meant.
Describing this revelation as a sign of the “breathtaking
level of ignorance of people”, he is even more critical of
the fact that it shows how those living or working in a
certain milieu will happily use an ‘alienating’ language
shorthand that suits them, and it is not then much of a
leap to understanding that if you wish to lead and inspire,
you will have to do so using language the majority will
both understand and respond to.
Take the word ‘community’, which Tim uses to describe
what he believes lies behind “our collective yearning for
something more, something more redemptive” and then
wishes he had not because, in his view, it has been hijacked
by politicians on both sides and debased to such an extent
32
that it has lost its original meaning, which few people now
know. It comes, he will often explain to audiences, from
two Latin words: com munas, meaning, he says, “together
in gift”. “Real communities”, he maintains, “are all
about relationships and built on the distinction between
transactional and gift relationships.” And he leaves you
in no doubt that it is those gift relationships that the
inspiring leader will want to nurture and encourage.
If energy, passion and using the right kind of language
– whether describing the environmental challenges we
are facing or the types of community that will have the
resilience to adapt to the changes that lie ahead – make it
onto his list of leadership qualities before we have even
formally broached the topic, then so too does trust.
I know this because he tells me an anecdote about the
building of Eden, which he says was “an incredible act
of trust between the McAlpine building companies and
ourselves”. There were legal contracts, of course, but
there was also a personal letter signed by Colin McAlpine
which promised that regardless of the terms of those
contracts, the Eden project would be built on time, on
budget and without the kind of blame culture that so
often lands the parties involved in such complicated
builds in court long before the visitor gates can even
open to the public.
“When I attend conferences on innovation I say,
you don’t want to worry about innovation – the only
thing you need worry about is the thing that is usually
lacking and that’s trust because it’s the absence of trust in
relationships that causes so much damage.”
In a passing nod to his previous career as a singer,
songwriter and middle-of-the road music producer,
Tim says that unlocking the talent in people, young and
old, is still the aspect of his management (leadership)
work that continues to excite him: “I love realising that
what I’ve done is to light someone up and help them
remember the person they dreamt they could be when
they were 19 and then believe they could be it again.”
And he describes the management style of Eden (where
the workforce of 437 rises in summer months to closer
to 600) as an “ensemble style of management” before
squirming away from that word too, declaring, “All
January/February 2011

The Eight, 1930 (linocut), by Cyril Edward Power
Image: Private Collection/Photo © Osborne Samuel Ltd, London/The Bridgeman Art Library
these phrases become glib, don’t they?”
So now we have energy, passion, language, trust, relationship
and community emerging as the core qualities and values
of the visionary leader. The next quality – curiosity – makes
complete sense because a leader or anyone who is not curious
is not asking questions and, mostly, those who are not asking
questions are those who do not wish to challenge the status
quo and have a vested interest in not doing so (which is Tim
Smit’s biggest criticism of most well-meaning environmental
NGOs and their leaders). These uncurious do-gooders do not
wish to hear answers that might not suit their agenda, and so
will not be listening anyway.
The role of curiosity in inspiring leadership is critical and
Tim shares another anecdote that shows how this quality still
motivates his own search for answers. He had, he tells me,
the privilege of spending several months with some of the
Indigenous peoples living alongside the Amazon river, where
Issue 264
his own curiosity was fired by that community’s
deeper understanding of the rainforest.
“The villagers were busy removing the thatched
roofs that actually shelter them from the sun and
replacing them with tin roofs simply because
they are modern, and I could see they were being
affected in the same way by the same things we’ve
fallen for just because they are new – but they had
something we don’t have, which was the concept of
arutam – the spirit of the jungle.
“I’ve always understood that people who are
genuinely connected to a place feel a rhythm about it
which is different to those who only experience the
surface of somewhere. It was what I wanted the people
visiting Eden to experience – not the names of plants
but the feeling of how a plant struggles to survive
in the rainforest and how much more brutal and
unforgiving it is there than in an English woodland.”
With talk of the ‘spirit’ of the jungle, you could
argue that we are perched perilously close to the
kind of “hippy shit” Tim Smit has been notably
critical of. In a speech last year, he used that precise
term and then had to apologetically mop up behind
himself, explaining:
“My comment about ‘hippy shit’ was in no
way meant to decry the efforts of those who are
encouraging the first steps in community action
through various mediums such as growing your
own and so on: merely that we have been here
before many times and the danger of becoming
over-impressed with such steps is that it drowns
out the scream from the future that a truly radical
shift in philosophy and leadership is required –
one that questions the fundamentals of the way
we do business, measure growth and take on
responsibilities as citizens as opposed to just being
aware of our rights.”
He had gone on to add: “It is in my view, a form
of ‘corporate structure or organisation’ that has the
potential to change the very fabric of society and
business itself. If you want to go muesli weaving,
wear open-toed sandals and get in touch with
yourself, go somewhere else. I’m not interested,
because it won’t change the world.”
So what kind of leadership do we need?
“Well, there are now millions of social and
environmental organisations around the world
and most of them do not have traditional patterns
of leadership, so we’re entering a time when huge
influence is being exerted by a movement with
no obvious leader – which actually is making it
quite effective.
“I like the metaphor the American environmental
writer Paul Hawken uses when he describes all
these organisations as ‘acting like antibodies’ which,
when there is a problem, come together, deal with it
and then disintegrate. I find that a lovely idea.”
Tim Smit was appointed CBE in 2002. Susan Clark is
Editor of Resurgence
33
LEA D E R S H I P I N P R AC T I C E  EDUC ATION: KARL JAEGER

Big Save by George Shewchuk Image: © Images.com/Corbis

34 January/February 2011
A Lifetime of Activism
Are good leaders born or made?
James Arnold-Baker profiles pioneering
educational and environmental activist
Karl Jaeger
L
ong, long before these matters headed the daily news
agenda of global concerns, Karl Jaeger was an activist
for a sustainable environment, and linked this to
radical improvements to educational systems around
the world. We may have plundered and polluted our planet, but
our children’s education should be a vital tool to help repair the
damage – to the great benefit of their and future generations.
Karl Jaeger’s own upbringing held very few clues to his
later career. The only son of a self-made German-American
industrialist who founded the world’s largest manufacturer of
cement-mixer trucks, Karl was privately educated in the USA’s
prep-school and Ivy League institutions. But a clash with the
authorities at Cornell led to his expulsion – and to his studying
political science at Ohio State. There he first glimpsed a global
agenda after one of his professors remarked, “We should be
in Paris to understand this…” So, in 1958, he founded the
International School of America.
This unique institution took students for an academic year
around the world, staying with local host families before
returning to their own USA university. The school boasts many
successful alumni – including Zac Goldsmith, MP, former editor
of the Ecologist – and its programme continues to this day under
the aegis of Boston University. But for Karl Jaeger it was the
intellectual first step in his development of a different educational
agenda: one that was both pupil-centred and sustainable.
Still in the USA, Karl was one of the early pioneers of the
charter school movement, which bids for state funds to run
independent schools – a vision now developed as free schools
in Scandinavia, and a key part of the new coalition government’s
plans for UK education. These schools have become immensely
popular in the USA, as real alternatives to the state-run schools.
There are over 6,000 USA charter schools, with around
360,000 pupils on their waiting lists.
Not content just with independence, Karl went on to devise
a new pupil-centred curriculum known as the ‘Jay system’.
Abandoning classrooms, the Jay system focuses on achievement
units for individual pupils, allowing them to progress at their own
pace, and is combined with a heavy use of IT. The Jay system also
replaces competition for grades and places with collaboration.
It was, perhaps, a step too far for the 1980s. Whatever the
reason, local politicians blocked Karl’s plans for a charter
school that would implement this new way of thinking and
educating children.
Fast forward, then, to the UK, where Karl moved in 1981
Issue 264
to take up residence in two elegant Georgian crescent houses
in Bath. Continuing his activist path, he soon became deeply
involved in local educational and cultural institutions, as a
governor of what is now Bath Spa University, and as a founder/
operator of the Jabberwocky Montessori nursery school. He
was also a founder of the Brillig Arts Centre and Bath Arts
Association, which launched Bath Fringe Festival, now part of
Bath’s annual Music Festival. He also rescued and revived the
Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institution.
But it was the unexpected revival of an old family asset that
sparked the latest and most significant of Karl’s projects. For years
the Jaeger family had joked about their ownership of a defunct
coal mine in West Virginia. Suddenly, demand from steel mills for
the mine’s product – coking coal – increased dramatically.
Struck by the irony of an environmental activist owning a
coal mine, Karl resolved to devote the earnings from the mine
to a major environmental initiative. Observing the seemingly
relentless growth of population, of urban sprawl, of pollution,
of tribalism, the negative drag of organised religion, and the
endless succession of wars (an average of over 50,000 annual
deaths since the end of the Second World War), he decided
that we needed somehow to drop the baggage of history. We
needed to make a clean start intellectually, and to use this clean
start to design our planet afresh.
The result was Our Future Planet, which Karl founded in
2008. Its website invites members to become citizens and design
the future of their Planet Earth, starting from scratch. Pages are
devoted to the major issues of our time – the environment,
If we are to survive, collaboration
must replace competition
sustainable living, population, energy, transport and travel,
education, globalisation and human rights – reflecting the
movement’s stated objective to cover a wide range of issues,
not to focus on a narrow area of lobbying.
As the number of citizens of Our Future Planet grows, it aims
to be the leading social network for the environmentally aware.
Membership is spread right across the globe; the website is
both a meeting place and a locus for action on the burning
issues of our time.
“Collaboration must replace competition, if the human race
is to survive – but is man intelligent enough to make this vital
transition?” is the challenge Karl presents.
His own lifetime of activism leads one to believe that his
rhetorical question can indeed have a positive outcome.
James Arnold-Baker is a former CEO of BBC Worldwide and Oxford
University Press. He is Chair of the charity Book Aid International,
which sends books to deprived communities in sub-Saharan Africa.
Visit Our Future Planet: www.ourfutureplanet.org
35
LEA D E R S H I P I N P R AC T I C E  ANIMAL RIGHTS: ROB LAIDLAW
Coming of Age
The Canadian animal activist Rob Laidlaw tells
Rukmini Sekhar why the animal movement should
be an integral part of the environment movement
Rukmini Sekhar: What made you take up the cause of animals?
Rob Laidlaw: I’ve always had a strong empathy for animals
ever since I was a child. In 1979 I went to the Toronto Festival
of Festivals [now the Toronto International Film Festival]. They
were screening a film called The Animal Stone. It was a two-and-
a-half hour film showing what humans did to animals: food
production, animals in entertainment, laboratory research and
testing, and many other similar issues. At the end of the film
there was a call to action. And from the very next day, I decided
to take up the cause of animals.
You work with Zoocheck Canada. Tell us about it.
I started Zoocheck in 1984 as a vehicle to lobby for the
regulation of zoos in my home province of Ontario. Zoos were
completely unregulated and as a result there was a large number
of very amateurish roadside zoos as opposed to professional
zoos. These amateur zoos had little money, untrained staff and
leave much to be desired in terms of animal care.
You have worked with the animal movement for the last 31
years. Where do you think it stands now?
In the past 20 years the movement has grown in numbers.
Take the USA, for instance. There are at least 20 million
people there who now support animal rights organisations.
It is also increasingly entrenched in popular culture; I saw
This tidal wave of human
population has only escalated
the human-animal conflict
a film recently in which Hugh Grant was being chased by a
bear, and as he was running he shouted, “I’m a member of
PETA!” But unfortunately, it hasn’t progressed much in terms
of behavioural changes on the part of individuals or political
action. That’s still a huge gap. But the animal movement has
certainly come of age.
What is the history of the modern animal movement?
Peter Singer released the book Animal Liberation in the mid-
seventies in the UK and the USA. I would date that as the start
of the modern animal movement, particularly in the West,
though traditional societies have always had customs and
philosophies that protect animals. So it’s about 35 years old,
which makes it a relatively young movement. We are new and
still in the process of developing. That’s part of the frustration
36
for us, whereas the other social justice movements, such as
the anti-slavery movement, the environment movement and
the women’s movement, have made much more progress.
Compared to that we are in our infancy.
The movements you have mentioned are human-centred,
where the players can speak for themselves and demand their
rights. But animals cannot speak for themselves and so are
entirely dependent on humans to speak for them.
It is a handicap that impedes the growth of the animal movement.
For instance, look at the anti-slave-trade movement. At one
point, there were close to 1,200 anti-slavery organisations
in the UK alone; you had countries applying international
pressure and the slaves themselves staging revolts. But in the
case of the animal movement, there are not enough activists
and, as you say, the animals can’t advocate for themselves. If
they could, they would be able to completely turn the tide.
The human mind is conditioned to believe that “they are just
animals”, meaning that animal lives are not as important as
ours.The need of the hour is to promote the idea of a rights-
based movement for animals.
Exactly. Our biggest goal should be to abolish the definition of
animals as ‘property’ under law. Under most laws, animals are
no more important than, say, a chair, a bed or a toaster. They
have no more rights than those objects, because under the law
animals are the property of humans. Every animal, whether
wildlife or on urban streets, ought to have rights under the law.
Do you see the animal movement becoming a priority item
on the agenda of this millennium?
It should, ideally, but it is unlikely. We might have symbolic
announcements from the UN, but at the ground level we
humans are far too anthropocentric, always placing our
interests above those of animals. The animal movement should
be an integral part of the environment movement, but many
environmentalists just don’t see it.
If anything, anti-animal behaviour and cruelty to animals are
escalating.
They are escalating because of human population growth
and rising materialism. Most futurists do not think human
population is going to level off for another three decades. So
we are talking of close to a million more people on the planet
every four days. This tidal wave of human population has only
escalated the human–animal conflict.
January/February 2011
Leaping for the high, wild mountains, from The Snow Leopard, by Jackie Morris Image: © Jackie Morris www.jackiemorris.co.uk/
I wonder why only very few
governments are focusing on the
reduction of human population. If you
talk to anybody who is trying to preserve
wild spaces, to poverty activists or to
environmentalists, they will all point
to this mass of humanity that keeps
growing and growing. Even if you
have a part of that mass that is ethical
and compassionate, there are still huge
numbers of people who are not.
So do you think working for animals in
this scenario is futile?
What I like about working with animals
is that while the big picture seems bleak,
you can make a difference to a few animals
at the individual or collective level. At the
micro level you can have some wonderful
successes – you can make the lives of so
many animals so much better.
When someone kills an animal, it is not
considered a crime. Do you think good
legislation is the solution to end such
brutality?
We need strong laws. I was talking to some
Issue 264
people in Bangalore. Most of them said the
laws are poorly written and implemented
and almost impossible to enforce. It’s
the same in Canada and the USA. Few
legislators and governments are really
serious about animal rights. They are not
given the importance they deserve. If real
laws were put in place, we might see some
significant reduction in animal cruelty.
How do you think consumer trends are
affecting the plight of animals?
Look at the so-called rich nations. Giant
multinational corporations of a few rich
countries control the consumer trends
of the globe. Take the case of whaling.
Japan is a wealthy nation but it is the
lynchpin in the worldwide continuation
of whaling. It is the rich, not the poor,
who contribute most to animal cruelty.
Animals are the biggest victims of
globalisation, which has seen the influx
of exotic “global cuisines”. These are
fashionable cuisines that do not concern
themselves with the ethical production of
meat and dairy. Knowing how farm animals
are treated would bring tears to our eyes.
Sheep transportation from New Zealand
by ship is horrendous. There’s a huge
matrix of problems caused by globalisation
that directly affects animals. The average
animal activist, concerned with animal
care work, has little understanding of
international treaties. Relatively small
numbers of activists are lobbying industry
and understand how the World Trade
Organization (WTO) works.
Then the next leap of growth in the
animal movement should concern itself
with political activism?
I believe that’s what some activists are
aiming to achieve: to increase the political
sophistication of the movement, to engage
in lobbying initiatives at international
conferences and to challenge the politics
of the WTO. We want laws and we want
changes in behaviour. We want real
political action and consumer change. So
we need to create a stronger and more
broad-ranging movement.
Rukmini Sekhar is a social and animal activist
based in New Delhi.
37
LEA D E R S H I P I N P R AC T I C E  THE MEDIA: FRANNY ARMSTRONG
Fight the
Good Fight
Leo Hickman profiles Franny Armstrong, the
Age of Stupid film-maker and founder of last
year’s 10:10 carbon-reduction campaign
T
here was never much doubt that
Franny Armstrong was going to
devote her life to championing
social and environmental
causes. Her family upbringing made
sure of that: “My grandma was probably
my first influence when it comes to the
environment,” she says. “She used to get
annoyed at Christmas at all the wrapping
paper being used.
“Then, when I was eight, I went to
New York with my dad, who was a
documentary film-maker, to sell his film
about global poverty. My mum was also a
human rights person – she used to take in
homeless people. I began to think about
how other families in the world would
be living on less than 60p a week, which
was the same as my pocket money. I guess
it wasn’t a surprise that I had become a
vegetarian by the age of 11.”
Franny, now 38, was volunteering
for both Greenpeace and Friends of the
Earth by her late teens, but her first ‘taste’
of connecting with a wider audience
came not through her campaigning,
but through her skills as a drummer.
Whilst studying zoology at University
College, London, she scored NME-level
success with The Band of Holy Joy before
finding herself frustrated in that role
and quitting – an early display of the
restlessness and self-determination that
38
have been constants in her life ever since.
It was during a 10-week spell mapping
coral reefs in Tanzania in 1994 that she first
heard from her father about the ‘McLibel’
trial, which was just starting up in London.
The fast-food corporation McDonald’s had
decided to take two environmental activists
to court after they published a pamphlet
criticising the company.
“I just decided right there that I had to
film it,” says Franny. She admits she did
not realise that the case, including endless
appeals, would rumble on for a decade,
making it the longest court case in English
history. “It wasn’t until 1997 that the trial
ended. I kept myself afloat financially by
selling footage to news channels, but I
eventually got the documentary McLibel
screened at the Sydney Film Festival and it
all took off from there.”
Before long, Franny’s head had been
turned by another worthy cause: “I
thought I would never care about
anything like this ever again, but then I
was reading The Guardian and saw an article “Everything I do is
called Village in the Shadow of the Dammed
about the building of the Narmada Dam
all-encompassing”
in India. I borrowed £1,000 and took my – Franny Armstrong
sister out to India. Within two days, we
were in jail after getting caught up in the
protests.” She laughs now at the memory:
“Everything I do is all-encompassing.”
Three years later, Drowned Out was
January/February 2011

Global Warming 2 by Paul Powis Image: Private Collection/The Bridgeman Art Library
released. At the same time, Franny was working on a
documentary called Baked Alaska, about how the northerly USA
state squares the allure of drilling for oil with the threat of
climate change. It was a subject that would soon come to
dominate her career.
“I always knew that I wanted to do something with climate
change,” she says. “It goes back to my university days. My
student thesis was controversial at the time because I discussed
whether the human species was suicidal in the light of issues
such as nuclear war and climate change. One of my tutors said
it was the best thing they’d ever read by an undergraduate. It’s
Issue 264
a theme that I later developed in the film The Age of
Stupid.”
Franny began making her most famous film before
Hurricane Katrina in 2005, but it was this event
that gave her renewed determination that this was
the right project at the right moment. “I began the
search for five characters with various lifestyle and
environmental contradictions and ended up filming
them across two years. But after I showed the first edit
at a screening, the feedback was that I had assumed
too much knowledge. It was at this point that we
came up with the idea of the actor Pete Postlethwaite
doing a voiceover as a fictional character looking
back on our plight from the future.”
At a panel discussion following the London
premiere of the film in March 2009, Ed Miliband
– now Leader of the Labour Party but at that time
Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change –
received a hostile reception, with both Franny and
Pete Postlethwaite urging him to reject plans for a
new coal-fired power station at Kingsnorth in Kent.
A few weeks later the plan was indeed rejected.
That incident spurred Armstrong on to launch the
10:10 campaign just six months later. At the heart
of the campaign was a very simple idea: can we –
individuals, businesses and governments – reduce our
carbon emissions by 10% by the end of 2010 and
thereby show that carbon reductions need not be a
daunting task if collective, progressive steps are taken?
The idea caught on and hundreds of hugely
diverse people, groups and organisations – ranging
from British cookery guru Delia Smith and the
Royal Mail through to Tottenham Hotspur Football
Club and even an army barracks – signed up to
the campaign, which rapidly gained international
status, spawning similar efforts in more than 40
countries, including Australia, Ghana, Bangladesh,
Russia and Nepal.
On 10 October last year (10:10:10), all the
international groups united to celebrate their
common cause. But the campaign did not end
then, with talk of a possible rebranding, and whilst
the idea of 11:11 has now been ruled out, the
sentiment of promoting achievable and significant
carbon reductions will continue.
Franny says she will continue the “good fight”,
but is now taking time to recharge her batteries
before her next project, which has yet to be decided:
“I would describe myself as a benign dictator. I
sometimes fear I get so involved that I’m going to
give myself a heart attack. But I’m now trying to
scale things back a bit. I’ve been working one day a
week on 10:10 and one day a week promoting Age of
Stupid. So I now have three whole days a week trying
to get my life back.”
Leo Hickman writes regularly on ethical issues for The
Guardian. For more information about the film The Age
of Stupid see www.spannerfilms.net Join the continuing
10:10 campaign at www.1010global.org
39
LEA D E R S H I P I N P R AC T I C E  THE ARTS: PETER MURRAY

Draped Seated Woman, bronze, by Henry Moore Photo: © Jonty Wilde, courtesy Yorkshire Sculpture Park

Art in Nature
Visionary and determined, yet humble and
hardworking – Peter Murray embodies all these
qualities of good leadership. He is the director of the
Yorkshire Sculpture Park, where artists and Nature
work together. Here, he shares the story of his vision
with Satish Kumar

40 January/February 2011
Satish Kumar: What’s the story behind your vision of
Yorkshire Sculpture Park?
Peter Murray: Well, it started in 1977, and the original idea
was quite modest. I was running a postgraduate course in art
education at Bretton Hall College and I had this idea of placing
sculptures in the ground, mainly motivated by education, to
give students the opportunity to look at works of art in Nature.
But when I started to research sculpture in the landscape, I
realised that there was no sculpture park in this country. There
had been some interest in developing a sculpture park – Henry
Moore was always keen to do that and so was Barbara Hepworth
– but nothing had actually happened.
Why did you want to have this connection between art and
Nature?
I’d always been interested in the idea of placing art in non-
art situations. I’ve got nothing against art galleries: I just like
the idea of utilising different situations. At that time there
was a lot of interest in sculpture in the open air. There was a
big exhibition in Battersea Park, organised by Brian Neale, to
celebrate the Queen’s Jubilee, so there was already a resurgence
in looking at sculpture in the open air.
How did you begin?
We started with a mixed exhibition. We had a modest grant of
£1,000 from the old Yorkshire Art Association, so we started
with a show of artists who had a connection with Yorkshire.
They either lived in Yorkshire, or worked in Yorkshire or passed
through Yorkshire at some stage in their career.
Then Henry Moore supported you.
We wrote to Henry Moore and he responded, very positively
and very swiftly, and came to see what we were doing. He was
impressed by the landscape, and offered his help. Actually, he
was very generous in his support. He had just established his
own foundation, so he offered us some money, lent us a piece of
sculpture and agreed to become our Founding Patron.
Henry Moore was one of the first sculptors who had the idea
of putting sculptures in Nature.
That’s true. A major turning point for him was actually placing his
sculpture in the Scottish landscape, near Dumfries, where he put
the Glenkiln Cross and his King & Queen. Having seen his work in
the landscape, in Dumfriesshire, he decided that that was the best
place for it. Then he started to acquire more land near his studio in
Perry Green and developed his own sculpture park there.
What happened after the first exhibition?
The first exhibition presented all sorts of managerial problems,
in terms of security, for example, and there was some political
opposition to it. But we had a really good Principal of the
college, Alan Davies, and he was very supportive. He had the
vision to understand what we were trying to do. At the time, I
was still Principal Lecturer in Art Education at the college and
had two jobs. Eventually I had to make a choice and I opted for
the Sculpture Park. With the support of the college we set up a
separate trust, independent of the college. After more than 30
years, we now manage about 500 acres.
Over the years, we have developed an exhibition programme
which is usually a mixture of group exhibitions, or themed
Issue 264
exhibitions, or individual exhibitions, but the first major
individual exhibition we did was Barbara Hepworth. She was
born near here, in Wakefield, and it seemed very appropriate
that we should have her at this park!
And that was a big success?
A huge success! It captured the imagination of the public, and
from then on the sculpture park became very well known.
In 1983 we organised a major international sculpture
conference. People came from all over and lots of impressive
artists came to talk, including David Nash, Anthony Caro and
George Rickey, the American artist. This was an important
event. It gave us a much bigger international profile and access
to a different group of people, and as a result we managed to
get some extra funding.
We organised that conference for several reasons. One was
to find out much more about art and Nature and to set up
a debate. We had several hundred people here, with all these
major speakers, and it created a huge debate in terms of what
one should show, how one should put it together; and from
that, we began to establish a way forward that consisted of a
programme of exhibitions, and a programme of residencies,
where we could support younger artists. Everything we do here
is underpinned by education. So those were our three principal
activities: exhibitions, residencies and education.
We decided not to acquire a permanent collection, because we
couldn’t afford it. We wanted to put all our money into exhibitions
and residencies, and by doing that, we gave many more artists an
opportunity to work here and it also gave the public a much wider
view of what art is all about. If we had put our limited funds into
a collection, we wouldn’t have had many pieces of sculpture, or,
alternatively, we would have filled the park very quickly.
Who were your artists-in-residence?
One of the first residencies we had here was with David Nash.
Then we had a residency for Andy Goldsworthy. We had Andy
here very early on in his career and provided him with space
and support. The point is that while we were developing bigger
exhibitions, we were still working with younger artists, and a
lot of them went on to be very successful.
As we developed the exhibition programme, we also started
to develop a plan for the landscape. We began to understand
the landscape much more and started to get into its soul. We
learned what a designed landscape is all about, and the way that
landscape can be designed to create different moods, different
atmospheres and different occasions. The landscape here was
designed to gradually reveal itself, and we took all of these factors
into consideration when we started to plan the exhibitions and
when we started to place sculpture in the open air. What we were
doing was creating a greater connection between the landscape
and the sculpture.
What was the thinking behind understanding the landscape
and connecting sculptures to it?
It’s a very delicate matter because you can actually ruin an
artist’s career by misplacing their work in the open air. What
happens when you place art in public spaces, whether it’s the
landscape or whether it’s in front of a building, is that you
lose the security of a gallery, so you’re then competing with a
building, you’re competing with trees, you’re competing with
41
traffic – so in a sense it’s a greater risk. You also don’t have
control over the way your art is presented.
Not having control confers a kind of humility to the artist
who then has to go with the grain of Nature, rather than
control Nature. But not all artists are full of humility. Different
artists approach the landscape in different ways. Some of them
want to conquer the landscape. They think in terms of placing
big, big pieces of sculpture there.
What we were doing was creating
a greater connection between the
landscape and the sculpture
Henry Moore used to talk about sculptural self-sufficiency,
so that a piece of sculpture doesn’t necessarily have to be big.
It doesn’t have to dominate. Scale is very important. By placing
appropriate sculpture in an appropriate setting you create a
dialogue between the sculpture and the landscape. Sometimes
you even create an argument between the work and the
landscape, and sometimes you create harmony between the art
and Nature.
Henry Moore’s work is very harmonious with Nature.
Yes, I think that is true. Moore’s work was very much concerned
with the organic, and, in a sense, you could argue it came from the
earth – and then, you know, he wanted to place it back in the earth.
David Nash’s work is in that tradition and so is the work of
Andy Goldsworthy. Their work is organic.
Absolutely. Andy Goldsworthy comes from a farming
background. His parents weren’t farmers, but he worked on a
farm. The whole business of working with Nature through the
King & Queen, bronze, 1997, by David Nash
Photo: © Jonty Wilde, courtesy Yorkshire Sculpture Park
42
eyes of a farmer is very much part of his approach.
He has a farmer’s view of Nature. Yes, there is more
harmony there.
The work of David Nash has a similar spirit.
David Nash does work out of doors, but he shows
his work indoors. He makes the pieces outdoors and
then likes to bring them indoors, so this current
exhibition is quite unusual for David, in the sense
that we have a lot of his pieces out of doors.
David sees natural sculpture in the wood and brings
it out. He doesn’t make the sculpture: the sculpture
is already in the wood, and he just brings it out.
Yes, yes, he brings it out. His career spans over 40
years and so it varies enormously, and if you go to
our Longside Gallery and you see his drawing of
the family tree, it actually traces the roots of each
sort of strand of his development, so what you’ve
just suggested is certainly true for many aspects
of David’s work, but sometimes he wants to make
objects as well. The geometry is very important
to him too and when you look at his influences,
particularly in the early days, you can see that he
was very interested in the work of Cézanne and
Kandinsky.
He is also influenced by Rudolf Steiner…
Yes, Steiner had a big influence on the way David
began to look at sculpture. The way he began to see
forms within trees. He has a sense of the sacred. In
some cases, sculptors see natural material as just a
material and use it to express themselves, whereas
David is seeing the sacred nature of the wood and
allowing the wood to express itself.
There are different strands running through
David’s work. His whole life is about wood and
about trees. He never uses seasoned wood, so the
wood begins to crack, it begins to change and he
enjoys that.
What about Antony Gormley? Have you worked
with him?
Oh, yes, several times. The first time we showed
work by Antony was in 1983.
At this moment, he has a big show in Austria.
That’s right. I wanted to go to the opening, but I
couldn’t get there. He’s been playing around with
putting figures on buildings. He had his installation
in London and he’s done one in New York, where he
has these massive skyscrapers and a little tiny figure
at the top, and now he’s transferred that notion to
the mountain. Sculpture embedded in Nature.
His Angel of the North is also outdoors, although
it’s not the same.
No, it’s slightly different. It’s a wonderful piece, but
I see it as a marker. It marks a spot. It’s an old coal-
mining site. The Angel helps to remind people that
January/February 2011
there was a coal mine there, but there’s more to it
than that. It greets you as you arrive.

By calling it Angel, Gormley has turned it into

more than sculpture: it can be seen as a spiritual
icon. Another person who comes to my mind in
this context is Richard Long.
We’ve shown work by Richard. His approach
to Nature is again very different from Andy’s
and David’s: he’s more connected to the poetic
experience of a landscape, where you walk on
your own, and go in search of whatever, and then
experience something.
He does these huge walks and writes about
them, and then makes pieces of sculpture where he
touches Nature and takes photographs but doesn’t
actually bring anything back. What we did here was
show aspects of his encounters with Nature. Our
landscape is pretty big, but compared to walking
in the Andes it’s nothing. So we had an exhibition
where we showed a series of walks that Richard had
done – images and memories of those landscapes.

Do you think at this moment in Britain sculpture

is very powerful and at a high point? There are
so many wonderful sculptors working more
successfully in comparison to other forms of art.
I think there’s been a huge amount of successful
sculpture in recent years. We’ve had wave after wave
of successful sculptors, and the whole language of
sculpture is changing dramatically even as we speak.
We now have a young generation of major sculptors
who work in such a diverse way.
You get sculptors who are working in a traditional
way as well as sculptors who are continuing to
expand the language. Damien Hirst is a case in
point. Some people would say he’s not a sculptor;
other people would argue he is. My own feeling is
that sculpture nowadays is an umbrella term that
encompasses many different approaches. Those
approaches might encompass Nature, but they Black Steps, charred oak, 2010, by David Nash
Photo: © Jonty Wilde, courtesy Yorkshire Sculpture Park
might not. What we’re concerned with here is one The David Nash exhibition runs until 27 February 2011 at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park
particular aspect of it.

This aspect is important at this moment because

of all the concern over Nature conservation and
human impact on the environment.
One of the things we’re very concerned about is
to protect and sustain the landscape, so we have
been working on a major project that includes
conservation of natural habitat.
We’re going to be working on our lakes, which have
got silted up over the years. We’re going to be opening
up a new area of land to the public.The most important
thing for us is open access – making sure that people
have the opportunity to see art. This is going to create
all sorts of opportunities for us in terms of different
approaches to art whereby artists will actually be part
of the landscape where they’re working with grasses,
with wildlife, and with the ecology of this place.
So when visitors come, they can experience two kinds of
art. One kind is the objects displayed, and the other is the
landscape itself as a work of art.
Absolutely. One of the things that I hope the art can do here
is introduce people not only to art, but also to the quality of
the landscape, and quite often the quality of the landscape
is enhanced by the art. And vice versa. The artist can actually
provide great insight. Good artists provide insight into
whatever they are concerned with, whether it’s Nature, or
the body, or words, or whatever. Ultimately, that’s what we
hope that people do get from visiting the Yorkshire Sculpture
Park – real insight.
Satish Kumar is Editor-in-chief of Resurgence magazine. Yorkshire
Sculpture Park: www.ysp.co.uk

Issue 264 43
REG U L A R S  P RO J E C T I O N S
Frodo Baggins, the unlikely hero in The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, 2003 Photo: New Line Cinema/The Kobal Collection/Pierre Vinet
The Hero’s Journey
Caspar Walsh explores a universal story structure that has
existed since humans first began storytelling, reminding us
that we are all the heroes of our own personal journeys
I
n the autumn of 2005 I was sitting at my desk in my
flat in Bristol, slumped in my chair with my head in my
hands. I’d been working on a play for Radio 4 for over six
months and I’d hit a familiar, impenetrable writer’s wall.
My producer kept coming back to me with the same problem.
Her feedback was simple: the structure wasn’t working.
Racking my brains for a solution, I remembered a story
I’d heard about George Lucas struggling with a script he
was writing about a mythological Western set in space.
He had the story fully formed in his mind but couldn’t
figure out how to put it together into a coherent narrative.
George and I had something in common – we had both
experienced the killer tussle with the elusive, critical
component of any good story: namely, the structure it is
44
held and told within.
Lucas had had a head start. As a student he had read Joseph
Campbell’s seminal work on mythology, The Hero with a Thousand
Faces. What Lucas found inside its pages provided the structural
solution for his groundbreaking epic, Star Wars.
Lucas invited Campbell to Skywalker Ranch to watch
the first three films in the series. Not having much
time for contemporary cinema, Campbell was initially
uninterested. But in the end he went, and the Star Wars
trilogy impressed him enormously. All the elements of
his monomyth – the central thesis of his book, more
commonly known as the Hero’s Journey – were deeply
imbedded in the Star Wars movies. They informed
the entire structure of the futuristic saga and proved
January/February 2011
Campbell’s tenet absolutely: that there is a single
story structure that crosses time and continent and
connects us all regardless of age, race, creed or
religion.
Campbell’s book is heavy going, but I followed
Lucas’s path and found what I was looking for. I
took what I felt were the key monomyth themes and
worked them into the heart of my radio play.
I completed the new script, said a prayer and sent
it in. My producer was amazed, asking me what I’d
done.The script worked, was recorded and broadcast
to critical acclaim. A key reason for its success came
from tapping into Campbell’s universal themes of
the timeless journey of the hero.
As a result, I’ve looked for these themes in all
stories ever since, particularly in big, all-action
adventure movies with a hero or heroine driving
the narrative. These films are often sidelined as
trivial escapism because of their adrenalin-fuelled
entertainment value. But they play a crucial role at
the heart of the arts and within society itself. These
movies are the ‘story medicine’ we need to keep
going, to remind us of our own heroic journeys
through life. The Hero’s Journey is a story form
enjoyed and cherished cross-culture for millennia
and is the creative lifeblood of any healthy,
functional tribe or society. And one of the biggest
‘access points’ we have today for the story of the
hero is within cinema.
I often find it hard to view my life through the
prism of Campbell’s monomyth simply because my
story stretches over years rather than the standard
90-minute thrill ride of a typical mainstream movie.
But when I take a step back and look at the trials and
triumphs of a year of my life, I see a deep connection
between my own life story and that of the intense
adventures of the journeying hero looking for the
Ultimate Boon.
The monomyth has been identified and named
because Campbell believed that all humans have
the blueprint of the Hero’s Journey mapped out
within them at birth. And we seek a mirror of this
blueprint through stories we’re told. For me, the
clearest reflection of the adventure of my life comes
through cinema. As a kid I watched movies over
and over, eyes wide, heart thumping, wanting to be
in the story. And I was, in all but body, immersed,
captivated and inspired. I wanted to be the pirate,
soldier, deep-sea diver and Argonaut.
Some of the most powerful movies depicting the
Hero’s Journey have been documentaries, including
Touching the Void, Heart of Darkness and The Cove. But such
spellbinding true-life tales are rare compared to
the thousands of adventure films created through
fiction. For me, fiction has the greater potential
for inspiring change because it invites viewers to
enter the story at whichever level they are most
comfortable with.
You could see a blockbuster as popcorn for
the eyes, a Saturday-night escape, or a gateway to
Issue 264
unlocking the unconscious; your choice. The Matrix is a perfect
example. At its core, this startling film invites viewers to wake
up out of their own Matrix-like existence, take the rough road
of deep consciousness and welcome the possibility of living a
far richer life, while offering riveting, edge-of-the-seat action
from start to finish. (For the record, I’m only referring to the first
film in the trilogy. Parts two and three were an embarrassing,
moneymaking venture off the back of what was clearly a one-
off work of cinematic genius.) It seems the creators woke up
for part one then swiftly drifted back into their own Matrix-like
sleep in the search for greater glory and financial reward with
the production of those woeful sequels.
The premise of the original film was based around computer
programmer Neo (Keanu Reeves) searching for meaning
through the networks of his home computer. Unwittingly he
contacts an underground movement dedicated to ‘waking up’
individuals ready to see what has really happened to a world
taken over by machines. Human beings are chillingly kept in a
permanent state of incubation as power sources for the ruling
machine elite. Human consciousness is kept alive and kicking
in the dream state of incubation by the creation of an imaginary
‘real’ world for each captive soul, keeping them from waking
up and breaking out.
The Hero’s Journey is seen as the
creative lifeblood of any healthy,
functional tribe or society
It struck me as a pretty straightforward analogy for the
decaying ideology of capitalism run-amok: not least of all how
it entices so many of us to remain in a lifelong loop of sleepy,
mock-comfort consumerism. What is projected out of the
cinema screen into our eyes in the form of a hero or heroine is
offering us a reminder of who we are on our own journeys –
who we have always been. Though our lives may sometimes feel
uninspiring, we all travel through Campbell’s monomyth each
and every day of our seemingly ordinary lives.
If you’re now wondering, “Who am I to think I could be the
hero within the story of my life?” have a look back over the
last year. Consider the trials, the calls to adventure, the refusals
and the taking up of so many challenges, great and small; the
support you’ve had and the achievements and changes that
have taken place as a result. Seriously. Ask yourself if your life
isn’t in fact one long, incredible adventure as powerful and
inspiring as any movie.
And it is this sense of adventure that is so often masterfully
summed up and reflected back at us through the Hero’s Journey
monomyth in so many modern-day films, including The Matrix,
Braveheart and The Lord of the Rings; projected into our eyes, hearts
and minds from silver screens, plasmas and cathode rays
throughout the planet.
This is potentially life-changing, mythical storytelling in a
world very much in need of this ancient, timeless wisdom.
Caspar Walsh is Resurgence’s Film Editor. His new novel, Blood Road, is
published by Headline. www.casparwalsh.co.uk
To see the full monomyth structure, along with the key Hero’s Journey
moments in The Matrix, Braveheart and The Lord of the Rings, see Caspar Walsh’s
film blog at www.resurgence.org
45
REG U L A R S  T H E V E G E TA R I A N FOODIE
The Tale of the
Octopus
No longer able to ‘turn a blind eye’ to the suffering inflicted on animals throughout
the food chain, our food writer Jane Hughes takes the leap into a vegan diet
T
here’s been some food for
thought over the year that has
just passed. In early October,
I was enjoying the last of the
summer sunshine in Greece, drinking
the local wine at a harbourside taverna
and idly enjoying the little fish flicking
and flashing silver in the water just a
foot away. I was then slightly aggrieved
when a posse of young boys arrived with
fishing lines and took up position nearby
– I hate to see fish caught.
Cue a conversation with my other
half in which I wondered aloud at my
peculiar dualistic take on the fishermen
of Greece. Old, leathery men puttering
about in wobbly boats, and smoking on
benches at the water’s edge, always with
a fishing line out, just in case… Well, I
hate to see fish caught but somehow I
was prepared to forgive the oldies. It’s
just what they do. It’s tradition, innit?
The young boys were a different
matter. As far as I could see, what they
were up to was no good. Just ‘playing’
at fishing and torturing fish for fun. I
turned my back on them but they tugged
at my attention again when they spotted
something in the water that sent them
running. Soon they were back with a
grown-up, and surrounding him, agog,
as he stretched full length on the quayside
and proceeded to reach into the water.
Was he tickling a fish? Against my better
judgement I carried on watching, then
turned away again in absolute horror as
he jerked back and held aloft a small,
writhing octopus. My back was turned,
but I heard the horrible, unforgettable,
repeated smacking noise, like a wet mop
on a wet floor, and the laughter of the
46
children, as he whacked the animal
against the ground until it was dead.
The taverna was, predictably, filled
with tourists, and the event didn’t pass
without protest. One man told the bar
owner that, personally, he didn’t mind if
they wanted to kill the octopus, but did
they really have to do it like that? The bar
owner responded that, if the harbour
police had been around, they would
certainly have stepped in. Meanwhile
the man with the octopus was haring off
home with his prize.
So, there I was, smacked in the face
with the kind of thing that goes on every
It is possible to be a
vegan and eat cake
that tastes great!
day, all over the world. Something I’ve
spent 25 years or more trying to ignore.
I told my husband that it wouldn’t have
been allowed by the police, and he gently
put me straight: the police would have
been concerned about the effect on the
tourists, maybe, but not at all concerned
about the octopus. In a tourist town, the
Greeks have to learn to hide the killing
that they do, because we don’t like to
see it. And in the UK, we have it down
to a fine art. Which is worse: hoiking an
octopus out of the sea and bashing its
brains out, then rushing it back home
to the cooking pot, or confining a bird
in a cage where it can’t even stretch
its wings? Or keeping a dairy cow in a
shed, like a cog in a machine, continually
impregnating it and taking its calves
away? Or a system where baby chicks
hatch out en masse in a warehouse and
never see their mothers?
Truly, the fact that I was shocked by
Greek people fishing for their food
speaks volumes about the extent to
which the facts of life and death for
animals in the UK are successfully
hidden, and, specifically, about the way
that my vegetarianism has allowed me to
distance myself from reality.
I’ve been vegan for two months now
– something I never expected. My in-
laws are pretty shocked, and are trying
to work out whether I’ve forced my
husband into it. I still haven’t had the
nerve to tell my mother (and I’m 46).
My best friend’s reaction was: “Well,
how antisocial!” And, yes, I guess it is.
People don’t like it. As a self-proclaimed
‘foodie’ I had problems persuading other
people that a vegetarian could really be
considered a food lover, given the large
number of things that, unlike them, I
didn’t consider to be food. Can a person
be a foodie and a vegan? I’ve worked
in vegetarian restaurants whose owners
refused to cater for vegans, and one well-
known vegetarian restaurateur for whom
I have enormous respect told me that he
was not in the business of catering for
people who had ‘food neuroses’.
Of course, I’ve entered into it right
at the moment George Monbiot has
decided it is no longer the right thing
to do. I’m not doing it to try to save the
world, I’m not sure I’ll stick to it forever,
and I’m certainly not out to make a big
January/February 2011
 Illustration: Meriel Thurstan

deal of it, but, right now, I feel better for it. I feel as if humans
aren’t really designed to eat dairy. Going without it sits well
with me – for now. I’m treating it as an experiment and having
‘Raw food’ fruit tart
some very interesting times poring over American vegan
This raw-food dessert works equally well as a breakfast.
cookbooks that call for all kinds of ingredients that I can’t get.
It’s deceptively filling because the nut and date base is
I’m astonished by the science that goes into the making of a
so dense – you don’t need much! It’s crammed with
vegan cupcake – and delighted by the fact that it is possible to
nutrients, and it’s a really good way of using up small
be a vegan and eat cake that tastes great! Hurrah!
amounts of fruit that is about to be past its best.
Over in California, some might consider my foray into animal-
Use whatever you’ve got – apples and strawberries
free cookery to be feeble and faint-hearted. I’m way behind. The
or blueberries are wonderful, but during the winter
next big thing, you see, is raw food.
months you might try apples or pears with finely sliced
I’ve been to raw-food restaurants in San Francisco and, if
oranges and raisins, or bananas.
you ever get the chance, you have to try it – what they can do
with uncooked fruit and veg, ground-up nuts and sprouted
Ingredients
grains is absolutely phenomenal. I’ve dabbled, but, honestly,
Approximately 100g dried dates
I’m not sure Britain is the right place to try to live on raw
100g pecan nuts
food. It’s just too cold and damp here. San Francisco – fine.
2 tsp cinnamon
Manchester – let’s just say it doesn’t seem to come naturally.
1 tsp natural vanilla essence
But, again, there are some little gems of recipes that deserve
A pinch of salt
to be adopted by more people. Did you realise, for instance,
that you can make your own nut milk perfectly easily by For the filling:
just putting some nuts (I like almonds) into a blender with Approximately 350g sliced fruit of your choice
some water, whizzing it up and then straining through some Juice of half a lemon
muslin or (if you’re a cookery nerd like me) a nut milk bag? 1 tsp natural vanilla essence
It works perfectly in coffee! A pinch of salt
Did you know that a mixture of Brazil nuts and garlic,
pulverised to a moist powder, makes a very fine alternative to For the base
parmesan cheese? Or that you can make really rich, powerfully Cut the dates in half and take out the stones. Chop the dates
nutritious and explosively tasty sauces and dips by simply roughly and process in a blender together with the nuts,
blending raw vegetables together? I didn’t, but I do now, and cinnamon, vanilla essence and salt. You should end up with
the exploration of ‘alternative’ cuisine that started when I a fairly firm doughy mixture. Press this into a shallow dish to
bought my first veggie cookbook in the 1980s seems to be form the base of your fruit dessert.
continuing as I rummage about in the undergrowth of raw-
food veganism. You don’t have to come with me, but I’ll send For the topping
back reports of my findings… Chop the fruit of your choice into bite-sized pieces and, in a
bowl, mix the fruit with the lemon juice, vanilla essence and
Jane Hughes is editor of The Vegetarian magazine. This year, she will salt. Use to top the date-nut crust and serve immediately or
be teaching vegetarian cookery at the Kalikalos Centre in Greece chill until needed.
(www.kalikalos.com). For more on animal rights campaigning see
our profile of Rob Laidlaw on page 36.

Issue 264 47
REG U L A R S  B I G F O OT, L I T T LE FOOT
A Cosy Home
Insulating British homes will cut the national carbon
footprint by 10%, says Mukti Mitchell
T 3
he English winter is not to be underestimated. As a child
I remember my father sat at the kitchen table wearing
a huge fur hat and a long scarf, with a Calor gas heater
beside him. The great Chilean economist Manfred Max-
Neef told me he had experienced winters in Patagonia, Norway
and Canada, but had never known such cold as he found in
London. He said, “It is the damp there that gets into your bones”.
I had the privilege to live through a winter in Finland. It
reached 40 degrees below zero, the ocean froze over with ice
a metre thick, and the Helsinki people spilled out over the
glistening white sea on a Sunday lunchtime to walk to nearby
islands. A 20-minute cycle ride would form icicles on my
moustache and culminate with a dash into a warm building to
tear off my gloves and vigorously shake the life back into my
frozen fingertips. But the Finns are well equipped, with saunas,
triple glazing, and plug-in car parks that stop your engine
freezing. To them it’s all perfectly normal. I once came out of a
pub there at 2 o’clock in the morning and spent half an hour
helping a man dig his car out of the snow, only to find it was
the wrong car! Perfectly normal.
But perfectly normal winters in England are getting rather
expensive. There is plenty of fossil fuel left, but the nice big
oil wells under shallow rock and water are used up. We are left
with thousands of small oil wells under deep rock and water,
and this makes it expensive to extract the oil. Hence a survey of
real fuel bills last year found they have been going up at 20%
per year for the last ten years. In 2004 it cost £400 to keep the
average British home warm for the year. In 2009 it cost £1,200.
At the same rate of increase, in 2020 annual heating bills will
reach £8,000!
What can be done? Common responses are:
1 “Put up wind turbines everywhere!” But the carbon
footprint of building so many wind turbines would send a
huge waft of CO2 into the atmosphere over the next 10 years,
when scientists say we must make massive carbon reductions
in the same period to avert climate change. And whilst I like to
see a few wind turbines, I don’t want to live in a forest of them!
2 “Build nuclear power stations!” But a similar argument
applies. Nuclear power stations have a massive carbon
footprint in construction, and they won’t start generating
for more than a decade. Decommissioning has a vast carbon
footprint too, making the electricity produced very expensive.
And not in my back yard, please! I’ve read all the articles...
48
“Get a thicker duvet!” Well, now we’re getting warm!
(Excuse the pun.) This is what I call the Duvet principle.
Imagine me getting into a bed with a thin blanket in the
middle of winter. I’m cold, so I make a hot-water bottle. An
hour later, and I’m cold again. I make another hot-water bottle.
Another hour passes. I have a neat idea. I don my dressing
gown, grab a torch and brave the night. After digging around in
the garden shed, I emerge with a roll of hosepipe and, dusting
it off, carry it up to the bathroom. I put one end on the hot-
water tap, lead the pipe into the bedroom, make several coils
around the bed, lead it back into the bathroom and pop the
end down the bath plughole. I turn on the hot-water tap, make
my way back into the bedroom, and climb into bed. Toasty!
Brilliant – until I get my next electricity bill!!! “Are you crazy?”
you shout. “Get a thicker duvet!” “How thick, exactly?” I ask.
“Eight inches? Twelve inches?” “No, that’s too hot for a British
winter – you’ll cook!” you exclaim. “A four-inch-thick duvet
will suffice nicely.”
But in our homes, we pump hot water into our rooms all
winter while the heat floods out through the windows, the
walls and the roof. With 27 million homes @ £1,200, we Brits
are spending £30 billion a year heating the planet directly!
What we need is a massive duvet to put over the whole
house. And a duvet for a house is called insulation. Glass wool,
rock wool, sheep wool, polystyrene, thermal boarding – they
all work just like a duvet, by trapping air bubbles. Trapped air
is a great insulator. If you put twelve inches of conventional
insulation (six inches of hi-tech) on all your walls, floors and
roof, combined with double glazing and draught-proofing,
your home will not require any heating unless the exterior
temperature goes below -3°C. It is warmed by human body
heat, since every human is a 150-watt heater, and it keeps itself
nice and warm under a duvet.
Newton’s first law of thermodynamics states that energy is
never lost – that is, it is never ‘used up’. Thus for every log we
put on the fire, the equivalent amount of energy is escaping
from the house. If we can slow down the heat escaping through
the walls, we will need proportionally fewer logs on the fire.
And where does all that heat escape from? A typical British
home loses 30% of heat through draughts, 20% through
windows, 10% through lofts, 25% through walls and 15%
through floors. Insulation can be fitted by professionals or DIY,
and here are some methods:
January/February 2011

Thermal image of a house Image: © Tyrone Turner/National Geographic Society/Corbis
Draughts
Ensure doors and windows close properly by attending to
hinges, catches and frames. Fit a rubber seal in the frame for
the door or window to close against. Fit a brush strip to the
bottom of a door.
Windows
If replacing windows, fit double glazing and specify a U-value
(heat-loss value) of 1.2 or less for timber or plastic frames.
For windows in good condition consider secondary glazing,
available in glass with wood or aluminium frames, or Plexiglas
(UV-treated acrylic). The best forms are almost unnoticeable
and cost a fraction of the price of double glazing.
Lofts
On top of the existing four inches of loft insulation, lay a
further eight inches, to make a total thickness of twelve inches.
Some councils, energy companies and supermarkets will install
subsidised glass, rock or plastic-wool insulation for around
£200 per home, since they can claim the saved energy as
part of their carbon-reduction obligations. A nicer material is
sheep-wool loft insulation, which has many advantages, and
whilst it costs twice as much to install, it lasts four times longer.
Walls
For cavity walls, there are companies that inject waterproof
insulation, which is effective and good value. Solid walls
require external or internal insulation. If the wall is rendered,
rigid insulation boards can be fixed to the outside, covered with
steel mesh and rendered over. Internal insulation can be placed
on the inside of an exterior wall and covered with panelling
or plasterboard. This should be four to eight inches thick in
Issue 264
In our homes, we
pump hot water into
our rooms all winter
while the heat floods
out through the
windows, the walls and
the roof...we Brits are
spending £30 billion a
year heating the planet
directly!
order to be effective. However, because internal insulation
prevents the wall being warmed by the room, moisture passing
through the insulation can condense heavily on the very cold
wall, causing damp problems. Therefore this method should be
designed and fitted by professionals.
Floors
Ground floors benefit from two or more inches of insulation,
so if replacing a floor take the opportunity to have it dug
out deeper than necessary to make room for the insulation.
Heavy floorboards, thick underlay and carpet are the next-best
options.
All together the above measures can reduce heat loss from
old properties by 80%. And the Energy Saving Trust, the UK
government’s body promoting energy reductions for private
homes, says that 24 million homes in Britain need to reduce
their heat loss by 80% to meet national carbon-reduction
targets.The remaining 20% of energy required can be generated
much more easily by wind and solar power. Insulating British
homes will cut the national carbon footprint by 10% and is a
critical component of government carbon-reduction strategy.
Financially, insulation is now one of the highest-yielding
investments you can make, offering up to 20% annual return
with little risk, and saving tens of thousands of pounds over
the next 20 years.
And most important of all, good insulation makes your
home wonderfully cosy!
Mukti Mitchell is director of the CosyHome Company and founder of
lowcarbonlifestyle.org
49
REG U L A R S  VO I C E F RO M T HE SOUTH

Who Will Feed

the
World? From field to kitchen, from seed to food, Indian women’s
strength is diversity – which is why genetically engineered
crops only serve to disempower them, writes Vandana Shiva

A
s yet another example of
the desperate ‘science’ of
Monsanto, it is now being
argued that genetically
engineered Bt cotton – introduced in
India in 1997 – has liberated Indian
women. In a paper authored by Arjunan
Subramanian, Kerry Kirwan, David Pink
and Matin Qaim, the argument is that
the crop produces massive gains for
women’s employment in India.
Women are the biodiversity experts of the world
But this argument is false on many
grounds.
Firstly, women have traditionally been
seed keepers and seed breeders, which
means that the knowledge and skills related
to seed conservation and seed breeding
have been women’s expertise. The seed
economy was a women’s economy. As
long as seed was in women’s hands, there
was no debt and there were no suicides.
Women have acted as custodians of the
common genetic heritage through the
shortage and preservation of grain.
In a study of rural women of Nepal, it
was found that seed selection is primarily
a female responsibility. In some 60% of
cases, women alone decided what type of
seed to use. As to who actually performs
the task of seed selection, in cases where
the family decides to use their own seeds,
this work is done by women alone in more
than 80% of the households, by both sexes
in 8% and by men alone in only 10%.
Throughout India, even in years of
scarcity, grain for seed was conserved
in every household, so that the cycle of
food production was not interrupted.
The peasant women of India have
carefully maintained the genetic base
of food production over thousands of
years. This common wealth, which has
evolved over millennia, has been defined
as ‘primitive cultivars’ by the masculinist
view of seeds, which sees its own new
products as ‘advanced’ varieties.
The replacement of traditional varieties
of seeds with genetically engineered Bt
cotton is an appropriation of women’s
skills, knowledge and decision-making.
This is disempowerment of women, not
empowerment. Moreover, women have
always played a significant role in agriculture:
most farmers in India are women.
The replacement of biodiverse
cropping systems evolved by women
with monocultures of Bt cotton leads
to a decline in food production.
This undermines women’s food
sovereignty and erodes food security,
which in women’s hands is women’s
empowerment. Further, it destroys
women’s work relating to agricultural
production and post-harvest food
processing. Interestingly women’s work
in relation to food sovereignty has been
defined as ‘femimanual’ work.
The growing of food is the most
important source of livelihood for the
majority of the world’s people, especially
women. It is also the most fundamental
economic right. Women were the world’s
original food producers, and they
continue to be central to food-production
systems in the Third World in terms of the
work they do in the food chain.
The worldwide destruction of feminine
knowledge of agriculture, evolved over

50 January/February 2011
A protest against cutting trees and a call for reforestation (Mithila Art) by Gitangeli Image: © Gitangeli/David Szanton
four to five thousand years, by a handful
of white male scientists in less than two
decades has not merely violated women
as experts, but gone hand in hand with
the ecological destruction of Nature’s
processes and the economic destruction
of poorer people in rural areas.
Agriculture has been evolved by women.
Most of the world’s farmers are women,
and most girls are future farmers. Girls
learn the skills and knowledge of farming
in the fields and farms. What is grown on
farms determines whose livelihoods are
secured, what is eaten, how much is eaten,
and by whom it is eaten.
Women make the most significant
contribution to food security. They
produce more than half the world’s
food. They provide more than 80%
of the food needs of food-insecure
households and regions. Food security
is therefore directly linked to women’s
food-producing capacity. From field to
kitchen, from seed to food, women’s
strength is diversity, and their capacities
are eroded when this diversity is eroded.
In India, cotton was not traditionally
grown as a monoculture: it was grown with
Issue 264
sorghum and pigeon peas and chillies. The
knowledge of these biodiverse systems was
women’s knowledge – a knowledge that
has declined as a result of the introduction
of Bt cotton. But it is a decline that is
perversely hidden. The monoculture of the
mind, focusing only on Bt cotton, falsely
projects women’s dependence on cotton-
picking as an increase in employment and
empowerment.
The FAO reports that women use
more plant diversity, both cultivated and
uncultivated, than agricultural scientists
know about. In Nigerian home gardens,
women plant up to 57 different plant
species. In sub-Saharan Africa, women
cultivate as many as 120 different plants. In
Guatemala, home gardens of less than 0.1ha
have more than ten tree and crop species.
In a single African home garden, more
than 60 species of food-producing trees
have been counted. In Thailand, researchers
found 230 plant species in home gardens.
In Indian agriculture, women use 150
different species of plants for vegetables,
fodder and health care. In West Bengal, 124
‘weed’ species collected from rice fields
have economic importance for farmers.
In Mexico, peasants utilise more than 430
wild plant and animal species, of which
229 are eaten.
Women are the biodiversity experts of
the world.
Women’s work in cotton-picking
(which Monsanto projects as an increase
in absolute terms) has increased because
monocultures have replaced mixed
cultivation of cotton with food crops.
The increase in cotton is because of the
replacement of biodiverse farming with
cotton monocultures, and the expansion
of acreage under cotton. It is not because
of higher yields of Bt cotton.
The introduction of the Bt gene into crops
is not a yield-increasing technology. It is a
toxin-producing technology. In addition,
even though Bt cotton is supposed to control
pests, the bollworm has become resistant
and new pests have emerged. Now cotton
farmers are using 13 times more pesticides
than they did for conventional cotton. High
costs of seeds and pesticides lead to debt and
debt leads to suicides – creating Bt cotton
widows, not liberated ‘housewives’.
Vandana Shiva is the author of Earth Democracy.
51
REG U L A R S  S L OW T R AV E L

Homeward
Bound
It took a humble bicycle, 4,000
miles and an unfriendly peasant
woman for Hannah Perkins to
face her fears and find happiness

W
hen I first moved to Thailand in
2007, I wanted to know why it was
called the ‘Land of Smiles’ so I tested
it out, smiling at hotel attendants, taxi
drivers, street sellers, and every time I was guaranteed
a beautiful energetic response.
No wonder they were smiling: delicious food was
in abundance, shopping and massages were cheap,
stunning tropical ecosystems were only a short
distance away and my weekends were usually spent
holidaying at the beach or in neighbouring countries.
Working for various environmental campaigns
provided some justification to live such an
extravagant existence but, increasingly, I felt that
something was not quite right. My life had become
a constant cycle of consumption in order to keep
that smile on my face.
I had been living this way – and feeling increasingly
unsettled by it – for two years when I received an
email from my friend Chris Roach that read like a
breath of fresh air. It said: “I’m in Indonesia and you
had better get a bike!”
Chris had left Australia to embark on a round-
the-world bicycle pilgrimage and he had asked me
to join him on the leg of his journey that passed
through Thailand. Of course, I agreed to the 2,500km
endeavour even though I had never cycled more than
25. But I knew instinctively that I had to do it.
The great mythologist Joseph Campbell once
said, “The adventure that the hero is ready for is
the one that he gets”. Little did I know that this
adventure would lead me to a richer life than I
could ever have imagined.
Taking the high road
And so it was that on a sticky monsoon afternoon in
November 2009, I wobbled a fully loaded mountain bike
anxiously through peak-hour Bangkok traffic. On two previous
attempts to ride in the city, I’d only got as far as the next block
and had collapsed on the couch afterwards, wondering why I
even left the house. Yet this was how I chose to leave the life
I had made in Thailand and begin a 4,000-mile journey from
Malaysia to China.
After an overnight train journey I met Chris in Penang. I
was instantly struck by the fact that here was someone who
had reduced his needs so much that the simple things – like
food, water, shelter and a bike – were really exciting. We set off,
and after eight hours of riding, we pulled into an abandoned
building, set up camp and went to sleep. In the morning I
woke to find that my bright blue tent had been indiscreetly on
display to the entire village. Chris just shook his head.
I rode for two and a half months through Malaysia and
Thailand, ate fresh seafood, washed myself in the sea, slept in
Buddhist temples and learned more about Thailand than I had
in the whole two years I had been living in Bangkok. With

52 January/February 2011

Photos: © Hannah Perkins
every step I took to make myself happier, I almost
inadvertently reduced my carbon footprint.
I forgot about fashion, make-up and hairstyles,
and opted instead for Lycra cycling gear, moisturiser
and a smile. Often I would ride several miles out of
the way to find a market where I could buy fresh
local produce. I asked local people to share their
drinking water with me. I quit buying souvenirs
to remind me of the blissful moments outside my
unhappy life, and created real memories that were
much more powerful.
At the end of riding along with Chris, I found
myself left with a new lifestyle, not much money,
but a lot of time and a bicycle. I had no intention of
going back to Bangkok, but what would I do instead?
I decided I was ready to ride into China, alone, so
I picked up some maps and some warmer clothes
and set off on a new adventure.
China seemed a world away from the one I knew
and I was intrigued by the unknown. As I crossed
Issue 264
the border from Laos I realised this country was nothing like I
had imagined. It was very remote, the mountains high and the
distance between towns vast.
My Mandarin was really bad, but my expectation that there
would be some people who would be able to speak English had
got the better of me. In Thailand and Laos I was able to speak
the language, which made asking for what I wanted much
easier. This was no longer the case. Using a picture phrase book,
I spent half an hour trying to ask a middle-aged woman if I
could pitch my tent outside her house. Looking confused, she
just disappeared inside her home. When I knocked on the door,
she yelled something that didn’t quite compute but sounded
very uninviting, which meant it was time to face my biggest
challenge yet: camping alone.
I found a spot down a bank near the road and lay down with
a knife in my hand, for fear of what ‘might’ happen. That night
I hardly slept, waking with the sound of every breath of wind
and every car passing on the road above.
Each day, I climbed higher and higher into the mountains.
After about a month the cold, exhaustion, anxiety and high-
altitude terrain started to wear me down. I became sick but
I forgot about fashion, make-up and
hairstyles, and opted instead for Lycra
cycling gear, moisturiser and a smile
refused to take medicine or go to a doctor because I knew that
what ailed me was rooted in my mind.
Impatient, I wanted to fight it, to overcome my fears, but as
I approached a pass at 4,500 metres, I stopped. My feet and
hands were numb, frozen by the snow. My mind was frozen by
my emotions. Taking a deep breath, I made myself really look
at my surroundings. I was gazing at some of the most serene
snow-covered peaks I had ever seen. I stopped listening to my
mind and started listening to Nature. I laid the bike down and
admired the view. Looking at all that was laid out in front of
me, I finally felt like I belonged.
It had taken me 4,000 miles and six months to realise that I
can be happy anywhere when my mind is at rest.
I set off back down the mountain. The smile had returned,
but this time it was a real smile. Happiness had not been
waiting for me at my final destination, but was to be found in
the journey itself.
Since then a series of chance events – serendipity, if you
like – has led me to North Devon, where I feel very much
at home. My lifestyle now combines work and leisure in an
effortless way and I spend time doing things that I enjoy. I
am learning to write, cook and grow vegetables. I meditate. I
enjoy living with simplified needs, taking responsibility for
my own impact on the environment and, most importantly,
my own happiness.
Even better, I know the journey is not over yet – in fact, it
has only just begun.
Australian-born Hannah Perkins spent three years in Thailand working
for environmental NGOs. She now leads a low-carbon lifestyle in
North Devon.
53
REG U L A R S  W I N T E R G A R D ENING
Gardening in Rotation
Gardening is a continuum of cultivating, planting and harvesting.
Brigitte Norland explains how our choices in this cyclical process
can improve the biodiversity of soil, plant and animal life.
R
egeneration occurs wherever seed, sunshine
and water are present, but gardens, subject to
our interventions, never remain static. Nor do
they necessarily evolve according to our desires.
Our relationship to the process of growth guides us in
creating the gardens that suit us. Nowhere is this more
pertinent than in the kitchen garden, where our need for
food places intensive demands on the soil.
Organic gardeners understand the principles of rotation
– moving the crops around the cultivated area so that no
one piece of ground becomes depleted. This can involve
more than simply dividing your garden into quarters for
potatoes, onions, brassicas and legumes, although that is
a good starting point. I began gardening with Lawrence
Hills’ Grow Your Own Fruit and Vegetables, written in 1970 with
the experience of post-war rationing. Diagnosed with
coeliac disease in later life, Hills preferred to garden with
a hearty weighting of potatoes and roots.
In your own garden, what do you like to cook and
This has to be the most artful gardening
I have ever come across
eat, and how do you like to work? Do you want to grow
year-round supplies, or preserve your harvests? I haven’t
yet tasted a vegetable I didn’t like, but I haven’t grown
them all successfully. Initially, I relied on help from older
countryfolk whose approach to the vegetable garden was
to dig the entire plot in March. Eventually I realised this
didn’t suit me, and in fact I was happier tackling a strip
at a time, composting and forking the light stony soil,
extracting yards of bindweed along the way.
Potatoes need plenty of room, with well-cultivated and
composted soil. The time and effort involved mean the
ground is cleaned of perennial weed when planting and
harvesting. Wide spacing of the rows helps prevent blight,
and in our relatively low-lying garden at least 30 inches
between rows is helpful.
Compost-grown potatoes have a delicious flavour and
a keeping quality that still surprises me; store them cool,
dry and away from rodents.
We love to use onions and garlic, and again these plants
need space, light and warmth, ingredients that are sometimes
at a premium in our more typically cool British summers.
A path of cardboard and a mulch of wood chippings laid
54
alongside the onion bed produced beautiful results in the
row right beside the path. Onions really do like to be well
weeded early on, allowing them to ripen free from the
moulds that can spoil them. Leeks love the same conditions
and need to be kept away from groundsel, mulleins and
hollyhocks, which can host rust – a fungus to which leeks
easily succumb. After these intensively cultivated crops,
the ground is ready for lighter users – carrots and salads –
restored with legumes and composted again for the squash
family or brassicas.
Gertrude Franck, in her book Companion Planting –
the fruit of 30 years of gardening in a continental
climate – adopts a form of rotation by row. Vegetables,
excluding maincrop potatoes, are grown in single rows
in companionable patterns with mulches between them;
the following year the spacing of the rows is moved along
to align with the previous year’s mulched soil. This has to
be the most artful gardening I have ever come across. The
year begins with sowing spinach rows 50 centimetres
(20 inches) apart over the whole garden. These provide
early greens, which are then hoed off as they run to seed,
thus providing the first layer of mulch.
Last winter, after several weeks of freezing temperatures
and the eventual snow melt, I realised how convenient
this could be as there was no annual weed left on the
vegetable garden: the first sowings could be made after
a light raking. (Usually flourishing carpets of speedwell,
which must be forked out, will survive the winter.)
Row cropping makes use of sympathetic relationships
between plant families, in terms of foliar growth, root
secretions and insect attractants or deterrents. Some
sequences can be unproductive when sowing, so the
preceding crop is always taken into account.
All empty ground is sown with mustard once the year
is so far advanced that no further cropping is possible. The
ground is never left naked, and plant debris is kept in situ
to continue the surface mulching. Traditional gardening
might baulk at these havens for slugs, but I have found that
beautiful toads often inhabit the layer of weeds on the surface
in summer, and during the winter months, the ducks feed
throughout the vegetable garden, scuffling under the surface
for slugs and snails. Chickens enjoy the same opportunities
but are better confined to one area at a time. Ours are great
individualists, separating as they feed, ranging over the
whole garden, and choosing their own roosts if they are not
found and housed by nightfall.
January/February 2011
 Garden by Liz Myhill Image: © Liz Myhill www.lizmyhill.co.uk
Eliot Coleman, writing as an
experienced market gardener in his
book The New Organic Grower, uses an eight-
year rotation with an under-sowing of
legumes between the crop rows: white
clover with brassicas and roots, soybeans
with corn. He carefully times the sowing
of the accompanying green manure so
that it does not overwhelm the crop, and
spaces the rows to allow for both. When
the crop is lifted the soil is still covered,
weeded and active. His beds are five
feet wide, to include a path of one foot,
whilst Gertrud Franck’s row spacing runs
in six-foot patterns – a good width to
cultivate as you work across your garden.
Issue 264
In May I had not worked all the way
across the garden, and the ground was
full of its own carpet; sharp shears and
a sheet of black polythene left on for
a fortnight created a perfect mulch to
be forked into the soil for planting the
waiting broccoli.
All the experienced gardeners I have
mentioned stress that their experience
of crop rotation and companionship are
based on their own locality. Your own
observations are always your guide and
will build a richness of growing experience
that will be evident in the soil.
Brigitte Norland gardens in Devon, UK.
55
REG U L A R S  L E T T E R S
Letters to the Editors
LEADING THE WAY
In ‘Letter from Japan’ (Resurgence 262)
there was much to celebrate – the
cradle of modern consumerism has, it
seems, given birth to an unstoppable
youth revolution against the awfulness
of unfettered materialism and the gross
usage of natural resources, and to a move
towards the more spiritual life.
Will this interesting trend be something
that the West too will embrace when,
like Japan, the consumeristic life loses its
shine and becomes nothing more than a
debt inducer?
Reading Undercurrents in this issue
certainly gave me hope for the future of
our planet.
David Harvey
Wiltshire
ENSLAVED BY DEBT
David Boyle and Andrew Simms, in
their article ‘Getting off the Treadmill’
(Resurgence 262), ask why we work harder
than medieval peasants, as we seem
to get richer. And they then suggest
that this is the central conundrum of
economic growth.
I suggest that the reason we still
have to work so hard today, despite our
wealth, lies predominantly within our
debt-based financial system.
The £680 billion in the British
economy (1997 Bank of England figures)
does not represent true financial richness.
Far from it. Indeed, 97% of the money
in circulation has been created by debt.
Only 3% of this huge apparent wealth
exists in the form of real, material, debt-
free coins and notes. The rest has been
invented by our financial institutions. It
is number money; figures on computers,
brought into existence each time we
borrow, yet allowed to make up a vast
proportion of our modern money
supply. Crazy as it sounds, almost all our
We welcome letters and emails commenting on Resurgence articles. These should include your postal address. Send your letters to:
The Editors, Resurgence, Ford House, Hartland, Bideford, Devon EX39 6EE or email: editorial@resurgence.org
Letters may be edited for reasons of space or clarity.
56
monetary ‘wealth’ is dependent on most
of us being in debt.
Some 97% of our monetary wealth, a
figure that has been rising at a rapid rate,
is now inextricably linked to interest-
laden borrowed money. This level of debt
is required in order to keep money in
circulation and the economy growing. Our
wages are increasingly eroded by personal
debt, whilst prices are increasingly inflated
by industrial debt, whilst technological
advances and government debt are creating
increasing job losses.
‘Status anxiety’ is exploited by debt-
ridden industry, encouraging us to
purchase things that don’t truly make
us happy. All this requires us to work
forever harder whilst making futile (for
most of us) attempts to pay off our debts.
In 1963, 21% of our total money stock
was still real, debt-free, government-
printed legal tender. Just 33 years later
this figure had diminished to 3.6%.
As Michael Rowbotham lucidly
explains in his book The Grip of Death,
whilst we remain in the clutch of
banks and building societies as far from
democratic control as they currently
are, most of us have to work like slaves.
Economic growth is forced upon us by
an unscrupulous financial system that
has us by the throat. Being wealthier
should mean we enjoy more leisure.
However, when so much has to be
borrowed for the money supply to be
sustained, we are enslaved.
Sue Holden & Anne Curri
Richmond, Hambleton & District Local
Exchange Trading System & Transition
Richmond, Yorkshire
MAKING WAVES
In response to David Harvey’s letter
entitled ‘Spectacular U-turn’ (Resurgence
262) it is no longer a matter of consumer
resistance to GM crops making this
technology “dead in the water”.
Decisions taken by elected or non-
elected state agents should be reflective of
the people’s wishes, but it would appear
that these decisions are being made on
behalf of the multinational companies.
It seems strange too, that although
many books and films have been made
regarding the dangers and failure of
GM crops, it appears there is not one to
assure the public of the safety or benefits
of these crops. Indeed, there appear to
be no peer-reviewed papers showing the
safety and benefits of these crops.
But the question is not now one of safety
to health or even to the environment, but
to the future of the world’s food supply.
Just a handful of companies own most
of the world seed patents (one company
in particular, which manufactures both
DDT and Agent Orange, owns over
90% of the seed patents) and yet we are
expected to trust them.
As world citizens we must individually
lobby elected and non-elected state
agents (most are contactable via email).
If we unite we can make waves.
Simon & Anne Wilson
Spain
FADING WORLD
I was deeply depressed by John Naish’s
neurotic review of Michael Foley’s book The
Age of Absurdity:Why Modern Life Makes it Hard to Be
Happy (Resurgence 262).
Ad hominem would be a weak remark
for the fortyish Naish – unable to accept
the facts of a fading world. I am not sure
Naish knows what to do; he looks for rose-
tinted views and reveals his own essential
immaturity of mind, knowledge and spirit.
Thanks then for letting a near-
septuagenarian have his say. “Onwards,”
as Bill McKibben says. (Tell Naish to join
350.org!)
Bulu Imam
India
January/February 2011
 Global Warning
Tsunamis sweeping across the deep seas
Hurricanes howling with deafening breeze
Earthquakes shaking our tectonic plates
Volcanoes erupting round Earth as it breaks

Dinosaurs died and allowed humans to stand

Millions of years changed the face of the land
A new world was born and with life it did flourish
Enough natural resources to keep us all nourished

For a long time the humans and Earth were as one

We drank from its rivers, bathed in light from the sun
The soil was rich, and ideal for seeds
The planet attended to all of our needs

But Earth for its pleasures could not comprehend

The mentality of its so newly found friend
We used and consumed without fear, or care
We scarred and we butchered a beauty so rare

Poisoning oceans and chopping down trees

Relaying landscapes to build as we pleased
Taking for granted our grand evolution
Seeds that were planted replaced by pollution

Have you not wondered why it’s so called Mother Earth?

Throughout all of history it has given birth!
This bluish green ball gently floating through space
Has potential for life quite like no other place

It gives and it gives and has nothing to ask

To treat it with love and respect is our task
For the moment the future we can’t comprehend
Is the world that we know may soon come to an end

But there is still some time to undo what’s been done

Requiring our species to all act as one
With wind turbines turning and running on air
Solar panels sourcing our sun’s constant glare

We could cut our emissions and clean up with care

Make it our mission to heal and repair
Salvage and save for all that its worth
Secure our existence as people of Earth

Global Warning © Martin James Powell 2008

Issue 264 57
ART S  P O E T RY : A B I C U RT I S
UNEXPECTED WEATHER
I n 2008, Abi Curtis’s first full-length
volume of poetry, Unexpected Weather, won the
Crashaw Prize.
Her work is often ecological in theme.
She holds up a beam of light to expose the
complicated and surreal connections between
the human and natural worlds.
She writes: “I’m interested in the mysteries
of the natural world, and our place as humans
Albatross
She roams on updrafts, the keel of her breast
resting on the wind, scaling each breeze
as if it existed only to lift her higher.
She navigates thirty years like this with just one
other whose grammatical dance has won her.
She clacks her notes into the squall
slopes the windward side of a wave to hook
out krill & squid, taking their boneless spills of ink.
She hang-glides from her wings,
lofty thoughts behind black eyes.
She’s no more moving than when she rests
day and midnight on the cliff.
The world soars through her –
it is that way around.
The Maori named her turoa and took her hollow
wing-bones to scroll histories on their faces.
She follows bait hooked to a long line
meant for the zeppelin bodies of tuna
and is snagged through her pale beak, dragged
while her tattered cloak unravels behind her.
Her mate remains. When their one egg hatches
he gathers bright-eyed fish from the tips of the sea.
Months later you’re walking the strewn beach
and bend to the perfect, blown-out tracing
of a half-grown chick, covert feathers unzipping
to reveal the plastic jetsam in its belly:
the buttons, bottle-caps & lighters
that converted creature to miscellany.
58
within it. The relationship is an uneasy one:
Nature can cause elation, wonderment, but
also fear. I’m fascinated by how animals are
incorporated into human cultural forms.
Some of my poems deal with endangered
animals, aiming to explore our responsibility
towards the natural world, how we impose
ourselves on other species, how what is lost
might haunt us.”
Elephant Ultrasound
When the permafrost thawed
the herdsman found it:
not just the usual bric-a-brac
of corkscrew tusks, ribs & skulls
but a whole mammoth baby
kept safe in the underworld.
Fragile skin, wool on its tail,
a thick fringe of eyelashes.
He wouldn’t touch,
knowing her brittle trunk
marked him for death.
He sent for the scientists
who came trembling to claim her
only to find a calf-shaped hole
in the snow; forty-thousand years
reclaiming its gift.
But she was propped outside
a tobacco shop in town,
her perfect tail being gnawed by a dog
the herdsman’s cousin grinning.
A palaeontologist from Michigan
spoke softly, touched her vellum skin
with a white glove, asked her where
& how she’d drowned,
counted out the coins of her nails.
Scans revealed sky blue vivianite
leached glittering from her bones,
her last meal, the sediment and clay
packed into her trunk in place of air.
She bobs in and out of his dreams
in a deep mud bath, eyes open,
trying to breathe him in.
January/February 2011
 edited by Peter Abbs

Blue Forest by Ann Johnson, oil on canvas Image: © Ann Johnson

Owl Butterfly The Ghost of the Nature Reserve

Idle on a round leaf They found my body here;
it shows its unseeing amulet: where dandelion clocks tick,
an owl’s look printed as a masquerade
counting the years in airborne wishes.
on a ragged wing the hue of tree-skin.
There is nothing more delicate than this,
It rests folded in a warm glass house
Except for eyelashes
behind the vast, tapestried palace
closed forever in nettles
we visited to celebrate the two of us.
We have been startled out of ourselves. or miniature fingers clamped tight in the chaff,
shreds of a stranger’s skin in their beds.
Owl-mask carried lightly as a paper kite
by this spindled insect whose own fractured I melted slowly into soil;
seeing eye’s more blind somehow food for woodlice, their caresses coiling
than the painted pupil that reflects us
through my hair, streaked in silver
knowing it will never swoop the vistas every evening by star-shine and snails,
of the palace, cheat its labyrinths,
but left alone by moths in their flimsy dresses;
or perch upon the shoulder of a statue
they search for light elsewhere.
in the dark long after closing time.
It will only look after us
as the lights snap off,
and then the gaze beyond the glass
opening out the revelation of its other half.
The Ghost of the Nature Reserve and Owl Butterfly were previously
published in Unexpected Weather (Salt). www.saltpublishing.com
www.peterabbs.co.uk

Issue 264 59
REV I E W S
CONFLICT
RESOLUTION
Peter van den Dungen reviews a substantial
new peace tome
The Oxford International Encyclopedia of Peace
Nigel Young (ed.)
Oxford University Press, 2010
ISBN: 9780195334685
I
t is a curious fact that anyone interested in exploring the
vital subjects of peace and nonviolence, peaceful conflict
resolution, peacemakers and peacemaking did not have
any reference works to consult until relatively recently. The
contrast in this respect with war and military history could
not be greater. Yet the concepts of peace and nonviolence – as
well as the numerous individuals, movements, campaigns and
associated institutions – have a long and rich history.
It is largely thanks to the development and institutionalisation
of peace research, peace studies and conflict resolution in the
1980s that, at last, such basic reference works as biographical
dictionaries and encyclopedias have emerged in this important
field of human inquiry and activity.
The World Encyclopedia of Peace, published in four volumes in
1986, was the first work of its kind. Following the end of the
cold war, a revised and expanded edition appeared in 1999,
when the three-volume Encyclopedia of Violence, Peace, and Conflict was
also published.
Now readers and researchers have a third peace encyclopedia
available. The fact that it is published by Oxford University Press is
not insignificant: it is one more indication that the study and pursuit
of peace are at last seen as credible and indeed necessary endeavours
at the start of a new century that has witnessed catastrophic wars
and instances of large-scale social violence, fuelled by rising arms
expenditure and a buoyant global trade in arms.
At the same time, there is widespread poverty, not only in the
global South but also in the rich countries of the North, making
‘disarmament for development’ an imperative for bringing about
a safer, fairer and more peaceful world. The Oxford International
Encyclopedia of Peace is an invaluable and stimulating reference for
anyone concerned about these interrelated issues. Editor-in-chief
Nigel Young was well-placed to oversee this ambitious project:
an academic equally at home in sociology, political science and
history, he was among the founding faculty of the Department
of Peace Studies at the University of Bradford in the early 1970s,
and subsequently was director of the Peace Studies programme
at Colgate University in New York. Importantly, he has been
not only a keen student of international movements for social
change but also an active participant in many of them (on both
sides of the Atlantic). This combination of scholarship and social
engagement is reflected in the choice of entries and in the
60
Image: © Bloomimage/Corbis
number and diversity of expert contributors.
The encyclopedia contains some 850 entries, arranged in
alphabetical order of keyword. They are of varying length,
depending on the importance of the topic; several entries have
sub-divisions, with different authors. The approximately 530
authors hail from all corners of the world, although the great
majority are from North America and Western Europe – despite
special efforts made to attract contributors from the South.
Each entry is accompanied by a concise bibliography, as well as
a list of references to related entries.
As one might expect from such a reputable publisher, the work
is beautifully presented, in four sturdy volumes of about 700 pages
each. The first volume contains a helpful chronology of significant
events concerning peace in history, from 1258 BCE to the present;
the last volume reprints the texts of some 40 key documents
referred to in the encyclopedia. There is also a detailed index.
The work opens with a substantial, thoughtful and
complimentary foreword by the Dalai Lama. Regrettably, given
Chinese sensitivities, this will make it difficult for the growing
community of peace and conflict resolution researchers as well
as activists in China to consult the work. It is followed by a most
interesting and valuable introduction by the editor that places
the Encyclopedia in the tradition of the great Enlightenment
project of the philosophes, the Encyclopédie of Diderot and
D’Alembert, publication of which started in 1751. Although
French authorities had officially banned the project (in order
to appease its religious and other conservative critics), they did
not obstruct its further publication.
It remains to be seen whether authorities in China will be
equally pragmatic. Young points out that, most unusually but in
accordance with the new thinking that the work represented and
wanted to stimulate, the Encyclopédie has an entry on ‘peace’.
The belief that war is not inevitable but a human construction
and that the rational and unarmed resolution of conflicts is
both possible and desirable still needs to be argued and heard,
especially in an age threatened by weapons of mass destruction.
The Oxford International Encyclopedia of Peace is a major contribution to
disseminating this vital message.
Peter van den Dungen is a lecturer at the Department of Peace Studies,
University of Bradford (and Senior Consulting Editor).
January/February 2011

An Energising
VisioN
Caroline Walker unravels Ellen
MacArthur’s much-publicised
personal transformation
Full Circle: My Life and Journey
Ellen MacArthur
Penguin/Michael Joseph, 2010
ISBN: 9780718148638
T
he media sound bite goes like
this: “Ellen MacArthur, 34,
champion sailor famed for
her record-breaking solo round-the-
world journeys, gives up competitive
sailing to save the planet.” And this
book recounts that transformation with
the detail, depth, passion and clarity it
deserves. For those who only know of
Ellen through her sailing exploits, this
long, reflective book rounds out the
picture of an extraordinary personality
with a significant message: that the most
important challenge a person can take on
is that of changing her mind.
I’m not a sailor; I can’t even swim, and
I stand in awe of Ellen’s voyages and her
phenomenal success. There is plenty in
the book about her early love of boats, her
supportive family, her steely determination
to learn to sail, her focus and drive to win
races in the face of tremendous odds.
There’s a glossary of sailing terms and
photographs of her various boats to help
the non-expert understand the vividly
written sailing sections and you sense she
is reliving the journeys as she writes.
It is, however, Ellen’s personal trans-
formation that is the most compelling
narrative thread. As an educator who
has spent many years thinking about
and attempting to convey the idea of
‘sustainability’, I identified with Ellen’s
frustration as she too became aware of
the concept but struggled to express it. In
public, she was lamely advising audiences
to ‘use less’, which she knew was coming
across as a real turn-off. She realised then
that she was conveying fear, not hope.
As I was reading her book, Stephan
Harding’s Animate Earth was also at my
Issue 264
Albatross flying over South Georgia Photo: Simon King/Nature Picture Library
side and I realised Ellen had actually gone
through the three stages outlined by Arne
Naess in Deep Ecology and described by
Harding: deep experience, leading to deep
questioning, leading to deep commitment.
How did she come to that deep experience?
By stopping!
On a camping trip to the remote islands
of South Georgia in the Antarctic, she had
time to sit and think. She saw old whaling
stations reduced to a collection of rusting
boats and abandoned buildings, and
realised that what humans do is find a
resource, take it, make things with it,
create waste and move on. Fossil oil came
on stream just as the great whales, once
so plentiful, were close to extinction; and
even with their hunting now so drastically
reduced, Ellen had seen no whales at all in
the Southern Ocean.
What also moved her were the
albatrosses who kept her company as
she absorbed the peace and tranquillity
of these wild and beautiful islands. Her
interactions with one young male – the
haunting photograph shows the bird’s
unbearably intelligent and poignant gaze
– and her awareness of the precariousness
of his existence are the ‘deep experience’
that precedes the deep questioning Ellen
goes through on her return home. She
muses on “how spectacularly we can miss
the point. How we as a species can not
only watch a resource deplete before our
eyes, but then quite simply walk away,
and move on to the next one.” A sailor
has to manage a small number of finite
resources until her voyage ends and she is
able to refuel and restock: but there is no
such refuelling station for the Earth.
Exploring the idea of living within
REVIEWS
planetary limits, she began to wonder:
“Why had I, together with every other
child of my generation, not been taught
this at school?” How could she use her
proven leadership qualities to frame these
new insights in a way that would be
inspiring and positive?
A timely meeting with Ken Webster, co-
author of Sense and Sustainability: Educating for
a Low Carbon World, supplied the focus she
required. First, she needed to rediscover
her optimism; and second, she needed to
understand the basic rules of life: the world
is “an intricate web of systems”, where
resources are actually abundant when used
according to the rule that waste from one
process is food for another.
This ‘closed-loop’ system has been truly
sustainable for millions of years. So don’t
tinker with the broken old linear ‘take-
make-dispose’ system, but “adopt the
rules which have been proven to work
for millennia”. No longer a ‘no more’
solution, but a ‘do more’ solution: with
the closed-loop model, things are “made
to be made again”.
Ellen’s deep commitment to this
energising vision is embodied in her new
Foundation, set up to “ensure that the
next generation has the necessary skills to
rethink, redesign and ultimately rebuild
our sustainable future”. She now has a new
vessel, and a brilliant star to steer her by.
It will be the greatest voyage of her life.
For further information visit
www.ellenmacarthurfoundation.org
Caroline Walker is former head of the Small
School in Hartland and a freelance consultant,
writer and facilitator.
61
REV I E W S
UNHURRIED
EXISTENCE
Andrew Cooper savours the heart-warming
story of an unlikely companionship
The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating
Elisabeth Tova Bailey
Green Books, 2010
ISBN: 9781900322911
O
ne moment Elisabeth was enjoying the invigorating,
dramatic beauty of an alpine village; the next, she was
struck down by a mystery virus. Hardly able to move,
and in a foreign land, most of us would just want to go home.
Critically ill and incapacitated, Elisabeth became keenly aware
of the seriousness and consequences of her condition but was
helpless to respond. Unsurprisingly, back from hospital in her
own bed, she plunged further from a bustling vibrant world
into a deep, dark, desperately lonely place.
Modern medicine seemed powerless to rescue her from this
terrifying ordeal. Incapable of doing anything, she was forced
to lie still. Even turning in bed required supreme effort, leaving
her physically exhausted and mentally drained. Yet out of this
terrible predicament there emerged a remarkable story of
hope, a journey of discovery and delight, illuminating a world
that most of us walk over without a thought.
Acting on impulse, a friend introduced her to an unlikely
companion, one with some very strange habits. Like her, the
snail had been uprooted from its home and transported to
alien territory. They shared something in common.
Disorientated by fitful sleep, Elisabeth would wake gradually
each morning, before the sharpness of day and the realisation
of her situation brought her mind back into sharp focus.
While the rest of the world
hurried past – friends and
family busying themselves
– nothing in her studio
seemed to have changed.Yet
the feelings of loneliness in
the small hours and sense
of utter desperation started
to fade.
All images: shutterstock.com
62
Looking every morning for the snail, reliving the night’s
nocturnal entertainment, it was comforting to find the little
creature now quietly asleep in a flower-pot or snuggled under
a fern by her bed. She was after all not entirely alone. Then
something extraordinary happened. Her new friend started to
lead her along a path of revelation, and even recovery, very, very
slowly. (Snails do nothing at speed.)
The experience of living in such intimacy with a ponderous
tiny life form, watching every move, studying its weird private
life, stirred a primeval passion that has helped drive the success
of our species – curiosity. When Elisabeth was eventually capable,
although not entirely cured, reading and research opened a door
into a different dimension: the wonderful world of the snail.
It is surprising to learn which people in history mention
them, the anecdotes and stories they tell, the legends and
superstitions, and the facts distilled from hours of meticulous
observation. On her journey Elisabeth had become an expert
on her gastropod friend. Yet every detail of their slippery lives
raises more questions. How do they communicate? Can they
feel pain and pleasure? They certainly seem to enjoy eating. But
far more than that, not only did the snail help her come to
terms with her condition, but it also helped a lost, gravely ill
soul return from a living hell, and an author emerge partially
from her shell.
This beautifully written story is a moving and amusing tribute
to the connection we all need with Nature, or lose at our peril.
After reading this book I will never again be able to look a snail
in its tentacle and think of it as a mere mollusc. We discover
that the snail lives a strange, unhurried existence, rasping a
This is an animal
finely tuned to its
own leisurely pace
of life, one that has
already survived
far longer on Earth
than any human
living, keenly aware of its surroundings and unerringly able to
return home whenever it feels the urge. This is an animal finely
tuned to its own leisurely pace of life, one that has already
survived far longer on Earth than any human.
If evidence were needed of the healing and enriching power
of the natural world, Elisabeth Bailey’s passionate, heart-
warming and illuminating little book is definitive proof. While
convalescing and confined to bed, her intimate observations and
empathy with a humble woodland creature reveal her own very
personal journey of survival. How a snail became her constant
companion, entertainer and even mentor is an extraordinary
insight to the potential of the human mind. This is a book to
be enjoyed at the pace of a snail, slowly savouring every detail,
letting the story slide seamlessly to its uplifting end.
Andrew Cooper is an author and wildlife film-maker and now a
revitalised molluscaphile.
January/February 2011

K
inthissa has a lot to say about a
subject that has, until now, not
had much said about it. In her
book, she aims to describe the elusive
and intangible. She does this through a
moment-to-moment approach.
She delicately records for us the subtle
states of internal experience during her
journey of healing herself from an injury.
We learn that, rather than misfortune,
injury can be opportunity, a great teacher,
forcing us to return to the simplest, most
essential building blocks of movement.
With a knowing mind, we can rebuild
our structure and composition anew. We
can re-imagine ourselves.
Kinthissa began her studies of Yang-
style Taiji in 1976, with Gerda Geddes,
who pioneered its teaching in England. In
1995, she met Chen Xiaowang, the leading
exponent of Chen Style Taiji Quan, and
embarked on her study with him. In the
book’s eleven chapters, she explores her
practice of Chen Style, which is notable
for its explosive actions. Yet it is the art of
standing in stillness that is at the heart of the
book, and at the heart of Kinthissa’s practice.
She quotes Master Chen, “Natural – first
principle!” and continues: “Daily, you look
for a suitable stance and fine-tune your
way, letting breath and qi work inside you,
until one day your posture is impeccable.”
She tells us, “It is good to be sparing with
the explosive actions, to let the power pool,
to store it. Power is creative. Power stored
makes one a contented person.”
Kinthissa hones her physical
understanding within her writing. We
Issue 264
ELUSIVE AND
INTANGIBLE
Eva Karczag finds resonance with a
more poetic approach to a martial art
Turning Silk: A Diary of Chen Taiji Practice, the
Quan of Change
Kinthissa
Lunival, 2009
ISBN: 9780956284600
can follow her thought processes as she
tracks events and impressions throughout
the ‘daily-ness’ of her practice. Her train
of thought leads us into each changing
experience, as she links inner life and
internal focus with the wider world outside
of the self.
The valley where she lives and practises
– its birds, beasts, vegetation and weather
– is present in her practice and her
writing. Observing the subtle details of
inner movement is not so different from
perceiving the natural world in all its
complexity. Both are miraculous simply as
they are, when we really listen and see what
is happening.
She documents the words of her
teachers – so important, since, especially
when coupled with touch and movement,
words become embodied experience,
sinking deep inside us into our cells and
atoms, to echo in our physical memories.
The many sources and explanations in
the Notes and References section also
helped to widen my understanding of
Eastern philosophy and culture.
Kinthissa’s analysis of video sequences
pictured in the book is detailed and objective.
Her writing is filled with beautifully
articulate accounts of inner movement.
Descriptions like “the core ripples”, “a
charged flowing”, breathing that can
“saturate the body” and “alert tranquillity”
provide the reader with tangible images that
create physical change through the power
of the mental pictures they generate. When
she makes the observation “Mindful that I
need to relax, I let go of effort”, I feel my
REVIEWS
Photo: © Kinthissa
whole being give way too.
Kinthissa constantly reminds us of
subtlety; how in this work we need to give
time for the unfolding. “Much can be moved
simply by breathing and awareness”, by
listening, waiting, observing, allowing, so
that undoing and reintegration can happen.
Then when we do make an action, it rises
out of more profound understanding. She
shows us how the qi, as delicate as it is, is
an effective force that requires “scrupulous
attention and accuracy” in order to be
contained and directed.
I could feel that this is a woman writing
– the quality, a poetry of sensation, gave
me a sense of the feminine aspect. And in
a field dominated by men, it is refreshing
to hear the way a woman approaches the
practice of a martial art.
In my own experience as a dance artist
and educator, I have found that it is the
presence and materiality of the body that
is the most potent source of movement –
hands and feet, spine and breath, fluids,
and impulses traversing the nervous
system – which, when attended to with
patience and awareness, gives rise to
energy, the fundamental mover. Kinthissa’s
book resonated with my own encounters
and observations of internal flow and the
channelling of energy – the great dance
– and will speak to anyone interested in
inner work who wishes to deepen their
own understanding and practice.
Eva Karczag is an independent dance artist
and educator who began her own studies of
Taiji Quan in 1973 with Gerda Geddes.
63
REV I E W S
EARTH’S
IMMUNE
SYSTEM
Miriam Darlington defends the weeds and
the wild
Weeds: How Vagabond Plants Gatecrashed Civilisation
and Changed the Way We Think about Nature
Richard Mabey
Profile Books, 2010
ISBN: 9781846680762
“
Plants become weeds when they obstruct our plans, our
tidy maps of the world,” writes Richard Mabey in this
exploration of our relationship with weeds. “If you have
no such plans or maps, they can appear as innocents, without
stigma or blame.”
Halfway through this weeds’-eye-view of Britain I found
myself out in my garden, arrested by a plant I had never noticed
before. Infected by Mabey’s enthusiasm, I was transfixed
by something prickly and spindly that I could not name. Its
delicate, wavy leaves were scalloped, uneven, beautiful in
their asymmetry. Suddenly this thistle did not appear ugly and
threatening; it was sculptural in all its stages of bloom and
decay, a living work of art. Later, beside my local river, I found
myself, nose lifted, sniffing the air for the scent of Himalayan
balsam, which only a few weeks before I might have been
tempted to trample.
With his characteristic lyrical appeal to the senses as well as to
the mind, Mabey invites us to expand our consciousness, to make
a shift from seeing ourselves as the rightfully dominant species,
and to open our hearts to an old enemy. As every aspect of our
long war with weeds is inspected, the narrative unearths the
closely stitched kinship we have with these prickly neighbours.
Weeds thrive in the company of humans; they flourish when we
disturb the earth and disrupt its patterns. And, of course, it depends
on what you mean by a weed, Mabey points out, as he scours
the ragged arcadia of our building sites, verges and wastelands,
giving these vilified species a lingering look. It is our choosing of
definitions that have made the difference to our plant kin, he says.
In fact, our drawing of boundaries between Nature and culture has
defined the character of most of the green surfaces of the planet.
After the Fall, God raged at man, and outside the Garden thorns
and thistles were part of the implied punishment.
Throwing light on our entwined ecology, Mabey quotes
Ralph Waldo Emerson’s alternative definition of the weed as
“a plant whose virtues are not yet discovered”. Mabey goes
on to look at our urban lifestyle, where the subtle social
considerations of “fashion, community solidarity, class, and
64
horticultural fervour” led us to further overlook,
persecute and marginalise certain plants.
Reaching into the past, Mabey shows that weeds
were present for a long while before they were
written about in Genesis. He unearths ancient
fossil evidence of the weeds that have been more
recently considered ‘invaders’ already layering
pollen thousands of years ago beneath the city
streets of London. He moves through the socio-
cultural aspects of the weeds that have been
alongside us for so long, their medicinal and toxic
aspects, their linguistic derivations, and their global
economic implications. He looks at the threats, real
and perceived, from alien invaders. But above all,
he seems to move his magnifying glass repeatedly
back to his own patch, revealing that the familiar,
harmonious rituals of naming and foraging are a
force connecting us to our biological roots.
This book is a celebration of belonging, not only
to our sense of place and our familiarity with it, but
also to the huge and intricate biological family to
which we are intimately connected. Mabey searches
the names of plants, and in doing so makes them
feel both fantastical and familiar, drawing out an
unexpected kinship even with the most exotic.
We worry that over-virulent weed immigrants
will swamp our biodiversity, but the author reminds
us that many cherished and now familiar parts of
our scenery came from beyond our shores: the
conker tree, the snowdrop, the Michaelmas daisy,
alexanders. Botanical naturalisation, he points out,
ought to depend on acceptable and appropriate
behaviour, not country of origin.
The underlying question of how to dwell in trust
and harmony with a place is a powerful undercurrent
in Weeds. The peasant poet John Clare, who did
just this, celebrated the unpretentious plants that
grew in the wall crevices, fields and common land
around his home. Writing with simplicity and
grace, he appreciated weeds for their vitality and
independence. He loved his local flora precisely
because they were local, known and familiar to him.
This marvelling at familiar, loved plants is exactly
what Mabey does too. But his acutely observing
modern eye is balanced by pervading considerations
of wider global and economic threats to the natural
world. In this period of environmental anxiety it
is possible to fall into the trap of apocalyptic fear
and panic, and Mabey wisely suggests that it is not
weeds that will bring down civilisation. In fact, he
says, weeds might hold some biological solutions;
they might just be the living pioneers that rebuild it.
Some of the most touching passages in the book
are Mabey at his lyrical best: his description of the
troublesome burrs from the burdock plant, with
their “fuzzy flexible hooks and thin spines”, the
inspiration for Velcro. Celandine, whose glossy yellow
petals many of us chase from our lawns but love to
see on a dappled forest floor in sharp spring light “as
if they were made of yellow metal, or oil, or molten
January/February 2011
Our drawing of boundaries
between Nature and
culture has defined the
character of most of the
green surfaces of the planet
butter”. In the case of the bee orchid,
Mabey marvels at how our sense of what a
flower should be like is challenged by “the
chimerical sense of a pink fairy’s wings
joined to a brown bumble bee’s body.
They seemed to transcend the realm of
the vegetable altogether, to be ornaments
of porcelain and velvet that had been
mysteriously animated by the sun.”
Mabey’s profound scientific knowledge
and his passionate fixation with these
plants gives one of the most honest and
balanced accounts of the plant world I
have ever read. Some of the more toxic
biohazards that ‘displaced’ weeds have
presented are lucidly discussed, but in
other places there is huge tenderness
towards weeds, which are, he suggests,
simply wild flowers in the wrong place.
He concludes that the effect of the
human battle with weeds has only been
to encourage the evolution of ever more
resilient strains, but also, ironically,
to create a backlash where there is a
growing sympathy for them. Taking the
poppy as an example of an extremely
Issue 264
effective, almost indestructible survivor
of agriculture, Mabey stresses that many
such weeds are unfussy about where
they live, adapt quickly to environmental
stress, and use multiple strategies for
getting their own way. “It’s curious that
it took so long for us to realise that the
species they most resemble is us.”
In opening our hearts to this
subversive, pulsing undercurrent of
life-energy, Mabey shows that weeds
actually stabilise the soil, conserve water
and provide shelter for other plants. In
doing so, he suggests, they are a kind of
‘immune system’, which moves in to
repair the damaged tissue of the earth.
There may be, beyond this book, a
different way of seeing: “If weeds are the
boundary breakers, the stateless minority
who remind us that life is not tidy, they
might help us now,” he asserts. “They
might help us to live across Nature’s
borderlines again.”
Mabey’s story of weeds is both
enlightening and heart-warming, but
it is also a chilling reminder about
Image: © Pete Dyer
our blind spots. Our technological
culture grants little value to the mystery
and intelligence of Nature, and this
book allows us to wonder anew at
the magnificence of it. “Whatever
institutions humans created to preserve
their civilisation from the wild, weeds
found ways of exploiting them,” Mabey
writes; our attitude and our economic
activities have merely encouraged
more cleverness and defiance from an
unfathomably ingenious ecosystem.
Taken to its conclusion, this book suggests
a seismic shift in cultural perspective and
behaviour. The question remains, where is
the moral or spiritual basis for our actions
towards the natural world? If some sacred
texts have demonised Nature, and science
has not yet expanded our understanding
fully, what comes next? Above all, this book
is a case for defence of the wild. Read it.
You will never look at your garden weeds
in the same way again.
Miriam Darlington is a poet and doctoral
student specialising in Nature writing.
65
REV I E W S
Survival
of the
Gentlest
David Cadman finds himself walking
arm-in-arm with an old friend
The Art of Ageing: Inspiration for a Positive
and Abundant Later Life
John Lane
Green Books, 2010
ISBN: 9781900322737
Q
uite a number of us who are no
longer young or even middle-
aged enjoy talking together
about what it is like to be as we are.
We are comforted, I think, by knowing
that someone else shares our infirmity
or rather the ways in which our bodies
age whilst we seem to remain as we
have always been: angry, cheerful, scatty,
competent, friendly, reclusive, and so on.
My body is 68, but I am 27.
But whether or not we enjoy such
talk, it is evident that ‘True Being’ means
participating in the cycle of ageing.
Everything we see follows the pattern
of which the Buddha spoke when he
arose from his deep meditation beneath
the Bodhi tree: “Coming to be, coming
to be; ceasing to be, ceasing to be.” The
cycle of birth, life, death and renewal is all
around us for those who have eyes to see
and ears to hear. And, despite the obvious
difficulties and discomforts of old age,
its anxiety and distress come not from
accepting the way things are but from
denial, from seeking to be what we are
not – forever young and in full bloom!
There is great peace to be found in
such surrender.
John Lane’s Art of Ageing is therefore for
those of us who are old and those of you
who are moving towards us who are old.
His book is amusing, honest, informative
and full of good things.
Anyone who knows John personally
will hear his voice in the text – gentle,
wry, sometimes poking fun and pricking
66
the bubble of pomposity, including his
own! It is as if we are in conversation
with him, sometimes nodding as he
shows us something we, too, have
already found; and sometimes being
surprised by something else quite new
to us. It is like walking arm-in-arm with
an old friend and saying, “Yes, that’s how
I feel, too,” and then, “Are you sure? I
had never thought about it like that.”
For me, one of the ‘surprises’ was the
idea that an increasingly aged population
might alter or shift the underlying ethos
There is great peace to be found in such surrender
of society – a gentle if somewhat grumpy
revolution. I suppose it is obvious when
you think about it, but I had not thought
about it at all. Quoting Theodore Roszak’s
“survival of the gentlest”, John suggests
that as the old become a larger part of
our society, the values that they profess
may become more dominant:
“The increasing proportion of old
people will in time tip the balance in
favour of values that they hold dearest:
the alleviation of suffering, non-violence,
justice, nurturing, and the maintenance of
the health and beauty of the planet [plus]
the value of sacramental or holy living.”
This is quite a radical thought.
There is another good thing to which
John draws our attention – the observation
of small things and events: “look for the
honest, the beautiful and the good”, he says.
Gloomily drawing his bedroom curtains,
Illustration: Clifford Harper, courtesy Green Books
he is startled by the sunshine of the early
morning; his spirit is at once lifted by
sunlight on a patch of earth. Time taken for
such moments may be part of the privilege
of old age – “the mystery that sings in all
things and can only be experienced with a
heart open to the new”.
And then, almost as an epilogue, John
gives us a number of small ‘pictures’ of
older people he has met. Largely written
in their own words, these short glimpses
into other people’s lives are rich and
unexpected.
There is no sentimentality here. The
pain and discomfort are real and tiresome.
And there is often no ‘answer’ to what
may happen next. But there is something
else: moments of peacefulness and even
equanimity quite beyond the reach of
the young and anxious middle-aged.
Insight? Well, maybe. Serenity? By chance,
sometimes. But life being lived? Certainly.
Until it isn’t. Well, not as we know it.
John does not offer us a treatise – and the
book is all the better for this – but he does
give us a series of pensées upon ageing,
urging acceptance, preparation, and a
delight in the detail. Lots of good stuff!
David Cadman is a Quaker and writer. His
book Holiness in the Everyday was published by
Quaker Books in 2009, and this year ZIG
Publishing will be publishing his latest book,
A Way of Being. www.zigpublishing.com
January/February 2011

THE
FUNDAMENTAL
DUALITY
Linda Proud enjoys the lyrical prose
of a book that nestles between
scripture and literature
A Complete Guide to the Soul
Patrick Harpur
Rider, 2010
ISBN: 9781846041860
S
oul and spirit: two intangibles so
hard to define that they are often
muddled. In a book which should
rightfully be called A Guide to Soul and
Spirit, Patrick Harpur has searched history,
mythology, anthropology, philosophy and
literature for help in giving form to these
most subtle of bodies. And we are in sore
need of understanding this basic duality,
for both our world and we ourselves
suffer from inner division. Soul and spirit
are estranged.
At first this book reads like a
compendium of all that has been written
on the subject – a quick overview –
but gradually Harpur’s magic begins to
work and you find yourself, as always
with this extraordinary author, at the
feet of a master. He has order and
imagination in perfect balance: having
had a vision or insight, he can set it
out with rational clarity. He is like a
mathematician with words.
At first we are guided through territory
so well-known it barely requires a guide.
That’s his way. He lures you in and from
the familiar takes you to the unfamiliar,
making it easy to understand in his step-
by-step exposition, and by the end of
the journey we discover we’ve crossed
a treacherous bog in which many a
theologian or philosopher has perished.
“Spirit is expressed in metaphors
of ascent, height and light… Soul is
expressed in metaphors of descent,
depth and darkness.” Spirit seeks God;
soul embraces Death. They do not get
Issue 264
along, these two, especially in that toxic
mixture of Protestantism and secularism
which is the Western mind.
Spirit is a puritan, an ascetic
disciplinarian. He resents soul: “her
images and urges, memories and fears,
farts and fits of giggles are always
breaking in on his high-minded, solemn
meditations”. Spirit is concerned with
truth; soul with beauty.
It is perhaps the work of this age, and
of every person in this age, to truly be
individual in the literal sense: that is,
undivided. For these personifications of
soul and spirit do not relate to anything
other than to ourselves. If my creativity is
blocked, it is my spirit doing it, criticising
all my efforts until no further efforts may
be made. If my meditations are agitated,
my soul is behind it, saying “Boring!
Boring! Let us dream!” The work is to
integrate the self, to harmonise these
apparent opposites for, as Harpur says,
soul/spirit is the fundamental duality
behind all dualities: male/female, yin/
yang, east/west, etc.
“A wholesome life, it seems, is made
out of holding spirit and soul together,
in tandem and tension.”
It is in holding such dualities together,
to believe in ‘both’ rather than ‘either/or’,
that an oscillation sets up. As the two wings
of the bird work together, the bird itself
is still. And from that oscillation a third
entity becomes apparent: the observer self
who simply watches it all play out.
“The self is what spirit spends a lifetime
REVIEWS
Photo: Shutterstock.com
searching for, heroically setting out by
land and sea to circumnavigate the globe,
to suffer hardship and slay dragons, until
he comes to the remote overgrown castle.
He hacks a way through, climbs to the top
of the tallest tower, and there, the love his
life, Beauty, lies sleeping. He kisses her.
She wakes… Her waking symbolizes the
soul’s dormant state till spirit wakes her,
and makes her real. What is less obvious in
our heroic age is that the kiss also wakes
spirit. He looks around him, rubbing his
eyes, and sees that the castle is in fact his
castle, the place he started from. Beauty
always slept there, but he did not notice
her, so eager was he to set out and find
her elsewhere.
“As soul comes to herself in spirit, so
spirit returns to himself in soul – and
they are joined in the holy matrimony
of the self.”
Sometimes one has a sudden suspicion
that Harpur is Mercury himself, our very
own psychopomp, masquerading as a
West Country writer, solitary and self-
effacing, not to be known except through
his work. I shall be referring back to this
book repeatedly, to drink its wisdom and
simply enjoy Harpur’s lyrical prose. It
deserves a place in everybody’s library,
nestling between scripture and literature,
linking and harmonising both, marrying
one to the other.
Linda Proud is the author of The Botticelli Trilogy
novels set in the Florentine Renaissance.
www.lindaproud.com
67
MEM B E R S  C O M M U N I T Y PAGE
Speaking Out
Featuring extracts of the new Resurgence blogs
The Cove
I G
was encouraged to see the connection between
my feature in issue 263 on the Oscar-winning
documentary The Cove and the blog posts of Leah
Lemieux [see below] on the subject of dolphins. It
seems the plight of the dolphins is once again on the
local and global media radar. I remember the first time
round. I lived in Ireland for a year in 1997. Part of the journey to the Ring of
Kerry was to discover for myself the local folklore of the famous Dingle Bay
dolphin, Funghi. Dolphinmania seemed to be everywhere. This incredible
sea creature brought a huge boost in local ecotourism as well as a connection
to the natural world that has literally changed the lives of thousands.
My experiences swimming with Funghi were not life-changing but they
had a powerful, lasting effect, as do the stories of those who have looked
into his all-seeing eye and found themselves changed forever. Swimming
in his watery world I was deeply humbled, and a little scared: reminded
of my natural place on land and the respect I have, and must have, for the
sea. The dolphins’ power and place in the ocean is without question. So we
must protect and respect their right to live fully and freely, as they did for
millennia long before we entered their sacred world and changed it forever.
Caspar Walsh is Film Editor of Resurgence. www.casparwalsh.co.uk
Directed Passion
F
or those of us trying to raise awareness about an issue or cause close to
our hearts, it is of utmost importance to direct our passion carefully.
In a world where so many seem dangerously deaf and blind to the
increasing troubles that beset us, it can be incredibly difficult to summon
patience and avoid venting frustrations on the very people we are trying
to educate. Where cooler heads do not prevail, we may inadvertently find
ourselves becoming part of the problem rather than the solution.
The flaring of our passion sustains our will and commitment to support
restorative changes, but – like a herd of wild horses – if not carefully directed
and guided, it can easily trample rather than enlighten ignorant bystanders.
Particularly in times of heightened debate or discussion, reining in our
passions is an unmitigated challenge. However, doing so almost invariably
rewards our efforts. Rather than alienating others, directed passion is a
powerful force of Nature that can engage and inspire those around us to
join our efforts and transform our world. We can
unite to discover solutions, as our passions carry our
hopes into reality.
Leah Lemieux is an author and lecturer who works on
dolphin protection, education and conservation initiatives.
See www.rekindlingthewaters.com
You can read all our blogs and add your comments at http://resurgencetrust.blogspot.com
68
Unlikely Solutions
overnment busybodies
talk of the stabilising of
atmospheric carbon at
450ppm by the middle of the
century, yet this ‘optimistic’ goal
is nonetheless associated with a
global 2°C average increase. The
future of our planet is entirely dependent on our
actions (or inactions) today. Waiting around hoping
for the best is not an option.
Solutions can sometimes be found in the
unlikeliest of places. Whilst many people would
baulk at the idea, the application of scientific
knowledge in the field of genetics to combat
rapid ecological degradation is valid, viable
and altogether effective. To date, media scare
tactics have enveloped the field of genetic
engineering in a dark cloud of Frankensteinian
proportions. Whilst it is true that, in the hands
of capitalistic multinationals with little or no
ecological incentives, genetic manipulation
has led to the development of fluorescent pigs
and featherless chickens, devoted independent
scientists across the globe are working furiously
to develop techniques based essentially on
the natural abilities of biological organisms.
For example, bioremediation makes use of the
natural biodegradative abilities of bacteria and
fungi to break down extremely toxic, synthetic
compounds into their non-toxic constituents.
Other feats of scientific ingenuity could, for
example, allow the identification of genes conferring
the ability to break down and metabolise petroleum-
based products in soil bacteria. These abilities could
then be transferred into other microorganisms at the
site of environmental disasters such as the recent Gulf
of Mexico oil spill and speed up the clean-up process.
Whilst it is true that the liberation of transgenic
organisms into the wider environment may provoke
a number of negative side effects further down
the line, it is a fundamental law of Nature that all
benefits must come with a cost. The power inherent
in the application of genetics to help mitigate urgent
environmental degradation must not be overlooked.
Glyn Barrett is currently training for a PhD in bacterial
genetics.
January/February 2011
C L A S S I F I E D A DV E RT I S I N G
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ACCOMMODATION
CENTRAL EDINBURGH
Friendly B&B in quiet Victorian street with
superb views to Salisbury Crags and Arthur’s
Seat. Varied continental breakfast. Walking
distance castle, palace, etc. 5 min. main bus
route. Tel. Moira 0131 668 3718
ST IVES, CORNWALL
Organic B&B. Attractive house on the edge of
town with spectacular views. Great access to
beaches, headlands and galleries. Good rail
and bus connections.
Tel. 01736 797377
www.2albanyterrace.co.uk
HIGHLANDS
Warm welcome for readers at Cairnhill B&B,
Dornoch, Highlands.  Most dietary needs
catered for.   Rest, relaxation and Reiki too.  The Frenchman’s Cove Experience
cairnhillbandb@gmail.com   Jamaica a combination of conference and
Geraldine 07540 645222
LARGE ROOM IN NW LONDON FLAT
offered to cat-loving reader. Long or short
stay, available November 2010. £80 pw
inclusive. Long/short stay considered. Z 2/3.
qigongshiatsu@tiscali.co.uk
COURSES
SOAP-MAKING WORKSHOPS
in South London. Telephone 0783 732 4985
for further details.
Visit www.genesissoap.co.uk
DANCING THE CIRCLE OF LIFE AND DEATH
Explore how death can teach us how to live.
Taster Days next spring Bath, Honiton,
Sussex & Oxford followed by year’s course
2011-2012 Honiton Devon.
Call Annee 01237 421252
or email anne@landcross.fsworld.co.uk
www.thebidefordapothecary.co.uk
Issue 264
ECO-ARCHITECTURE
ECO-ARCHITECTURE
Planning & permaculture design.
Sustainable ecological architecture and
design of buildings, planning applications,
planning appeals, Feng Shui advice.
Email: Sophie@eco-architectureandplanning.com
Telephone: 01235 529266
Website: www.eco-architectureandplanning.com
EVENTS
ECOHESION
offers freelance lectures in 2011 ‘The Ecology
of Economics’ – assumed ‘separability’ in
an ecologically cohesive (ecohesive) world.
Details: Stuart McBurney 0114 2888037
recreation in a beautiful setting. Join Paul
Davies, Cosmologist and Science writer, and
Martin Redfern, senior BBC Science producer,
for a leisurely week in which to consider “Life
the Universe and Everything!!” March 15th to
20th 2011 in association with the Scientific
and Medical Network www.scimednet.org/life-
the-universe-and-everything/
FOR SALE
SATISH KUMAR TALKS ON CD
A selection of talks by Satish Kumar is now
available on CD and DVD via the Resurgence
website. Talks include Satish’s Schumacher
lecture ‘Slow Down, Go Further’ (Dublin
2004), ‘Cultural Nonviolence’ and ‘Reverential
Ecology’. To find out more or buy a CD/DVD
online visit www.resurgence.org/satish-
kumar/video-audio.html
HOLIDAYS
FOR ALL READERS
who are considering a trip overseas, we
would urge you to visit www.seat61.com to
plan your journey by train.
NORTH DEVON
Small, comfortable converted barn. Very
pleasant location, 3m from sea, nr Clovelly.
Open plan. Woodburner. Sleeps 2/4. Organic
vegetables available. Tel. 01237 431589 or
email b.baker@virgin.net
CHURCHWOOD VALLEY
Wembury, nr Plymouth, Devon. For peace
and tranquillity, s/c holiday cabins in beautiful
natural wooded valley close to the sea.
Abundance of birds and wildlife. Gold awards
for conservation. Pets welcome. Tel. 01752
862382 churchwoodvalley@btconnect.com
www.churchwoodvalley.com
LONDON HAMMERSMITH
Nice B&B in family homes. Comfortable,
centrally located. Direct transport to
attractions, airports and Eurostar. Double £52,
single £39 per night. Children’s reductions.
Tel. 020 7385 4904 www.thewaytostay.co.uk
NORTH CORNWALL
Self-catering accommodation in spacious
barn conversion. Sleeps 8. Secluded rural
location. Ideal for visiting all attractions –
Eden Project just 40 min. Well-equipped
and very comfortable, with large private
garden. Contact Jeanette and John Gill,
Rocksea Farmhouse, St Mabyn, Bodmin,
Cornwall PL30 3BR john@rockseabarn.co.uk
www.rockseabarn.co.uk
YURTS AND HUT BY THE POND
A single yurt or a group of 4, or a hut by
a pond on an award-winning Cotswold
organic farm near Cirencester. See
www.theorganicfarmshop.co.uk for details.
69
HOLIDAY COTTAGE ON COTSWOLD
ORGANIC FARM
Lovely south-facing holiday cottage at the end of
the track. Woodburner, old Indian furniture, farm
shop and café to visit, the whole farm to roam.
See www.theorganicfarmshop.co.uk for details.
RUGGED, BEAUTIFUL PEMBROKESHIRE
Two eco-friendly, converted barns on smallholding.
Each sleeps 4. Coastal path 2 miles. Tel.
01348 891286 holidays@stonescottages.co.uk
www.stonescottages.co.uk
TOTNES (SOUTH DEVON)
Self-catering double-bedroom riverside
apartment. Situated on the edge of the
magnificent Dartington estate. Short walk
along the river path to Totnes mainline station
and town centre. Perfect base for exploring
by foot, canoe and bike. Canoe hire available.
www.littleriverside.com Tel. 01803 866257
Mobile: 07738 634136
ISLE OF SKYE
Superb yoga studio, teacher available, sea
loch, log stoves, self-catering 1-4 persons.
No single supplement! Tel. 01470 592367
www.skye-yoga-holidays.co.uk
ITALY, TUSCAN-UMBRIAN BORDER
Lovely 17th-century farmhouse, flexible
accommodation for 12-14, in two buildings
(access for partially disabled), six bedrooms
and four bath/shower rooms. In its own
private curtilage in soft rolling countryside
with far-reaching views and large swimming
pool. Well sited for Florence, Arezzo, Cortona,
Urbino and Perugia. Available year-round.
www.laceruglia.com Tel. 01392 811436 or
email slrs@perridge.com
eco-friendly cottage, hartland
Solar water, green central heating. Stunning
coast & countryside views. Sleeps 4. 01237
441490 www.peaceandplentyholidays.co.uk
email r.r@tosberry.com
ECO COTTAGES
SW Spain or Snowdonia. Sleep 4-5. In
peaceful olive grove or mountain woodland.
Birdwatching, walking, historic towns.
01766 590638 www.finca-art.co.uk
DORSET LOG CABIN
Peaceful & secluded location, 4 miles from
Lulworth Cove, on own area of heathland,
next to Dorset Wildlife Trust nature reserve.
Sleeps 6. www.dorsetlogcabin.co.uk or email
sohnrethel@aol.com
GLOUCESTERSHIRE
Rural retreat/writing space. En suite room,
stunning views, meditation room, kitchen,
donation basis. 01452 849180
dolley@wrekintrust.org
WEST OF IRELAND
Peaceful s/c accommodation in traditional
farmhouse, rural Co. Clare on an organic
smallholding. Well situated for Burren and
West Coast, walking, cycling, relaxing and
nature. See www.leenorganics.com or tel.
(00353) 6568 27460
70
PORLOCK
2 yurts for hire. Walks, beach, moors. 01643
862104 sue.voyager@hotmail.co.uk
NORTH NORFOLK
The Studio. Cley next the Sea. B&B. Very
relaxed, friendly, Artist run (returned from
East London). No pink frills or silly rules.
Vintage/contemporary/traditional. Directly
opposite beach road with wonderful panoramic
marsh views – 2 minutes into village. Doubles
and twin, extra mattress, cot. Guests’ sitting-
room overlooking evening barn owl haunt.
Big open fire, TV, piano, world film collection,
walled garden. Children very welcome – lots
of toys, cat & tortoise. Perfect for Blakeney
Point seals, sailing, crabbing. Tel. Frances
on 01263 740 38/07798 867 994 or email
info@franceskearney.com
TOTNES
Hope Cottage. Cosy cottage situated in centre
of town, easy walking distance to the station.
Sleeps up to 5. Parking, courtyard.
Tel. 01803 866257
NORTH CORNWALL
Beautiful 1940s’ Showman’s Wagon in
secluded setting. Sleeps 2 (+1). Only 3
miles from coast. Eco-friendly holiday. Tel.
01288 341105. www.bakesdownfarm.co.uk
MISCELLANEOUS
FIRST IMPRESSIONS COUNT
Proofreading and copy-editing by a member
of the Resurgence team. Reliable, friendly
service. Helen Banks 01726 823998
helenbanks@phonecoop.coop
STRESSFUL LIFE?
Articles, blog, professional coaching.
Sustainable living, sustainable small business,
how to downshift. www.sallylever.co.uk
HOMEOPATHY & COMPLEMENTARY
HEALTH
Telephone consultations, remedies &
energy medicine, significant discount for
Resurgence readers, free training for health
practitioners from highly experienced
homeopaths at Kesteven Natural Health
Centre. www.centreforhomeopathy.co.uk or
call Sue on 01529 460536
a legacy for the future
Your legacy, however modest, to the
Resurgence Trust could make the future a
better one. For more information, contact
Satish Kumar, The Resurgence Trust, Ford
House, Hartland, Bideford, Devon, EX39 6EE,
UK, or email info@resurgence.org
LIVING LOW-CARBON?
We want to hear from you! lowcarbonlifestyle.
org is featuring 100-word ‘Lifestyle Reports’
on low-carbon products and choices as part of
the new lifestyle resource. Examples are ‘My
wood-fuelled Aga’, ‘My skiing holiday by train’
or ‘How I gave up my car’. If you can contribute
a short report with photo we will be delighted.
Contact hannah@lowcarbonlifestyle.org
PROPERTY FOR SALE
IRELAND
Co. Clare and surrounding areas: farmhouses,
cottages, smallholdings, etc., in beautiful
unspoilt countryside. Some within reach of
Steiner school. Greenvalley Properties. Tel.
(+353) (0)6192 1498 www.gvp.ie
JARDIN DES ARBRES
Attractive granite cottage and adjoining ancient
farmhouse with landscaped three quarter acres
including pond, orchard, soft fruit, vegetable
and flower gardens. Rural hamlet 30km SW of
Dinan, Brittany. £185,000. 01305 261410 or
email alankrayner@gmail.com
ALPUJARRAS, ANDALUCIA
15+ hectares stunning mountain land with
three ruins. 1hr coast/Granada. Amazing
views. Plentiful water from own spring.
Neighbouring O’Sel Ling Buddhist Centre.
Ideal retreat location, self-sufficiency/nature
holiday project. £225,000 ono.
Details/photos contact wilcojames@mac.com
SERVICES
PERMACULTURE IN SCOTLAND
Experienced designer and forest gardener
available for consultation, design and
landscaping work throughout mainland
Scotland and the Isles. First consultation
session is free. All sizes of project considered.
Call Ludwig: 07760 142495
Email: info@re-forestgarden.co.uk
WANTED
“YOU’D MOVE TO RURAL FRANCE
in a heartbeat, if you could only sell your
house here... Well, would you swap your UK
property for our old and lovely half-restored
gem with some land? We’re quite serious.
Call 01793 813766 or email talis@talis.net for
more information.”
TAGORE FESTIVAL: REQUEST
for offers of hospitality in the Totnes area.
Resurgence is organising a week-long Tagore
festival of the arts & crafts at Dartington Hall,
Totnes. We are seeking offers of hospitality for
our speakers, performers & volunteers. If any
readers have spare rooms and are kindly able
to offer hospitality we will be delighted and
grateful. Please contact Satish Kumar with your
offers. Email: tagorefestival@resurgence.org
Tagore Festival, Schumacher College, The Old
Postern, Dartington, Totnes, Devon TQ9 6EA
January/February 2011
 D I S P L AY A D V E RT I S I N G
DISPLAY ADVERTISING RATES plus VAT
SIZE B&W COLOUR
Single box £80 £92
Double box £160 £184
1/4 page £240 £276
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Send your copy with PO/cheque/card details to
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Tel: 01237 441293 Fax: 01237 441203
Email: advert@resurgence.org
For full specifications please contact us or go to

resurgence.org/advertise
1/3 page £320 £368
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consecutive issues
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3/4 page £720 £828 FREE advertiser’s copy with box ads
Inserts (by arrangement only):
Full page £960 £1,104 8,000 at £70/1,000 +VAT; charity rate on request

A series of revealing and inspiring workshops for

people passionate about creating a sustainable future
4th September 2010 What Will Sustain in the Future?
5th September 2010 Finding the Future in Me
2nd October 2010 What Sustains the Human?
3rd October 2010 Dealing with the Future
The courses will be held at Waunifor in West Wales

Human Futures
For more details visit www.humanfuturesnetwork.com
To book phone Joan on 01559 395443

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Issue 264 71
Triodos Resurgance Economics Ad 11.10.indd 1 01/11/2010 09:50
 Brockwood
the psychosynthesis
& education trust
VACANCY Park School
‘The Future in We are a co-educational
at the international boarding school
Your Hands’ in the Hampshire countryside,
A one year course Resurgence Trust offering a diverse and
personalised programme of
starting February 2011 study including pre-AS, AS and
A level subjects. Our aim is to

Fundraising
Do you enjoy a challenge? Are you provide an holistic education for
around 65 students aged between
ready to grow personally and
14-19 years old that encourages

Manager
professionally? Do you care about academic excellence, self-
environmental and social justice? understanding, creativity
and integrity in a safe, non-
This programme is intended for competitive environment.
people from a variety of areas
including business, education &
health professions who wish to
“A unique school”
The Resurgence Trust The Good Schools Guide, 2009
explore new perspectives in a
personal and practical journey is seeking
focused towards effective and a skilled fundraiser
compassionate action in the world.
with
The course will encourage you to proven experience in
find your own ways of responding
to the question of how to meet
successfully securing
challenges, live, work and lead in funds from
more responsible and sustainable grant-giving organisations,
ways.
corporate sponsors and
Grounded in psychosynthesis and philanthropic individuals.
with guest presenters from other
disciplines bringing diverse
perspectives, the course will create
space for fresh ways of thinking For further details please email
and open possibilities for a rich
new synthesis of ideas.
info@resurgence.org
Please note: this pilot programme Deadlines for applications
is being offered at cost price 14th January 2011 Open Morning Saturday 6th
For further information: November 10am to 12.30pm
For information contact Vicki Lewin,
www.ecopsychosynthesis.org Tel: 01962 771744,
Email: enquiry@brockwood.org.uk
For information on any of our trainings and courses
Founded in 1969 by J. Krishnamurti.
go to: www.psychosynthesis.edu Part of Krishnamurti Foundation Trust
92-94 Tooley Street, London Bridge, London SE1 2TH
Registered Charity No. 312865
email: enquiries@petrust.org.uk tel: 020 7403 2100

O N L I N E A DV E RT I S I N G Resurgence(port).indd 1 13/07/2010 14:44

Increase your audience...

How do we live with Courage, Compassion
and Constancy in a fast changing world?
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Including The Samurai Game® created by
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The Resurgence website gets an average of 50,000 visits per month
Resurgence now offers online advertising for everyone who advertises in the
magazine – just place your classified advert online for an extra £10
Display advertisers can place a banner linked to a website for an extra £20
For more information call 01237 441293
email advert@resurgence.org or visit www.resurgence.org
and click on Resurgence Advertising
All adverts are subject to our terms and conditions, available at
www.resurgence.org/advertise or on request

72 January/February 2011
 Resurgence Weekend & Camp
Celebrating 45 years of Resurgence
Thursday 28th – Sunday 31st July 2011 and 21 years of Green and Away!
A weekend of talks, music, dance, crafts and
walks hosted by Green and Away at an idyllic
site near Malvern, Worcestershire.
Join Resurgence readers and contributors
for a weekend of sustainable living in action.
Organic food, wood-burning showers, crafts,
electricity from the sun and wind, and saunas.
“The summer camp programme has
exceeded my expectations on every point.
The quality was excellent.”
Book early as previous events have been full!
Early booking rate: £170 including all meals.
Reduced rates available.
For more information about the programme
and bookings email: info@resurgence.org
tel: 01237 441293
www.resurgence.org
For information about Green and Away visit:
www.greenandaway.org
This event will help raise money for The Resurgence Trust
(Charity No.1120414) registered in England and Wales.

AMB3076 Resurgence Advert Photo:17:20

3/3/10 courtesy Jay Ramsay
Page 1
GREEN ENERGY

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www.greenspirit.org.uk/books Offering Ethical Advice to Supporters of Amnesty

e-mail: greenspiritbooks@btinternet.com
Support what you believe in - and invest for a better future

Issue 264 73
 RESURGENCE GENuiNE sustaiNability
Re-use those envelopes
WHY WE LIVE AFTER DEATH
CLASSIFIED By Dr Richard Steinpach

ADVERTISING
COPY DATES
Issue 265 Mar/Apr - 4th Jan
Issue 266 May/Jun - 1st Mar
Issue 267 Jul/Aug - 2nd May
Please include my advert in the next
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Accommodation q Communities q
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74 January/February 2011
 HAWKWOOD
NEW YEAR
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29 Dec—1 Jan
Creating an Experience of
Inspiration with Forgiveness
Guided by teachings of A Course in Miracles'

CO- CREATING
in Momentous Times
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Issue 264 75
 Welcome to
Hartland House Retreat
A health and fitness retreat based in
5 star luxury accommodation in the
North Devon countryside.
Hartland House Retreat is all inclusive so
you don’t have to worry about a thing
during your time with us. Wake up to yoga,
take a jog along the beach, try some new
activities like afrobics or aqua aerobics in
our private indoor pool, eat some amazing
healthy meals and sleep soundly after
a relaxing massage. Spend some time
at Hartland House and enjoy some well
deserved time out.

Special Offer
Book for one of our retreats in 2010/11
and we’ll give you a 10% discount. If
you tell a friend about us, they will also
get a 10% discount.
To make your booking or to find out more,
email info@hartlandhouseretreat.com
quoting RESURGENCE.

www.hartlandhouseretreat.com

76 January/February 2011
Inspiration for Self-Reliance
Now with over 100,000 readers worldwide
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people who are creating a more sustainable, life-enhancing human society. Their
inspiring solutions show you how to grow your organic food, eco-build & renovate
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Call 0845 458 9040
to find out more. www.thephone.coop/resurgence

Issue 264 77
Schumacher Transformative Learning for
Sustainable Living

College Celebrating 20 Years of transformative

education at Schumacher College in 2011

Photo: Daniel Thistlethwaite Photo: Azul Thome

Transformative Purpose and Profit: How Ecological Facilitation:

Development
January / February 2011
The context in which we look
at development is ever-shifting.
This series of courses will look at
development as it stands today, and
how it could look in the future. There
is an urgent need for a contextualised
approach to this area of work, one that
reflects a more organic development
methodology and the complex realities
around social structures, ecosystems
and the global economic system.
One, two and three-week options
Teachers: Ian Christie,
Robert Chambers, Allan Kaplan,
Bunker Roy, Aruna Roy
holistic thinking can
remake business
February 21 – 25, 2011
Can organisations be successful and
genuinely sustainable – in the broadest
sense? This unique and innovative
workshop brings together the joint
faculty of Schumacher College and
Ashridge, a leading European business
school and consultancy. Using both
provocative teaching and highly
experiential ways of working the course
will explore and teach how holistic
thinking challenges and changes
traditional approaches to business
strategy, planning and purpose.
Teachers: Chris Nichols,
Chris Seeley
A gritty and creative
approach to leadership
27 February – 5 March, 2011
A change in direction is what’s needed,
and so at the core of this course is
the urgent question of culture change.
Whether you are an experienced
facilitator seeking a fresh approach
or improved ecological awareness, or
new to this field but wanting the skills
to lead or facilitate change in others –
this course brings together the radical
thinking that will enable you to be part
of this transition.
Teachers: Jenny Mackewn,
Antonia Spencer

www.schumachercollege.org.uk

For further information please contact us:

+44(0)1803 865 934
admin@schumachercollege.org.uk

The Old Postern, Dartington,

Totnes, Devon TQ9 6EA, UK.
Schumacher College is a part of
The Dartington Hall Trust, a registered charity. www.schumachercollege.org.uk

78 January/February 2011
LIVING HARMONY CENTRE Casa Delureni
SLOVENIA “House in the Hills”
Transylvanian Guest House and Retreat Centre
Jill Purce
Experience the quiet peace of the Romanian
countryside. Walk in the mountains, enjoy
the wild flowers and the
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birds, fish in mountain
streams. Take part in
The Healing Voice
Rediscover the ancient power of group chant
Magical Voice Techniques • Mantra & Sonic
our many holidays Meditations the
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Meditations • Mongolian Overtone Chanting
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Experience the beautiful and inspiring www.healingvoice.com • T: 020 7435 2467
Living Harmony Centre, specially
designed and harmonised according
to Feng Shui and Living Harmony
principles to help people reconnect
with nature and honour their true self.
Log onto our website for details of
upcoming workshops, or contact us for
hire details.

!!! Book now for !!!

The Gentle Art of Blessing
1-2-3 April 2011
workshop with Pierre Pradervand
Change your life and the life of others
forever by learning this gentle yet pow-
erful process, using blessing as a tool
for healing. Experience its inspiring and
eminent author, Pierre Pradervand,
and be prepared to both laugh and
be moved to tears by him.
Workshop: £180 incl. Fri. evening talk
Centre D,B+B: £130 for 3 nights (based
on 2 sharing, limited numbers)
Flights and transfers extra.
Delicious vegetarian food! For beautiful signed editions
of books by Jackie Morris,
including The Snow Leopard
and Tell Me a Dragon
(nominated for the CILIP
Greenaway Medal 2011)
visit Solva Woollen Mill
www.livingharmony.co.uk www.solvawoollenmill.co.uk
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+ 00 44 (0)20 8958 1740 www.jackiemorris.co.uk

Something to get the kids thinking!

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There’s no ‘dumbing down’ in AQUILA – every month a fresh
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Issue 264 79
MEM B E R S  R E A D E R S ’ O F F E R S
Gifts to treasure from The Resurgence Trust Shop
Unique gifts that will inspire and delight
A selection of our finest products, presented in a free reusable eco-friendly bag.
ART AND CRAFT
Drawing Wisdom from the Natural World
Featuring
The Beauty of Craft, a Resurgence Anthology
Life Lines, Truda Lane
On Being Human, Resurgence issue 260
£30.00 plus p&p
(UK £4.41/EU £9.70/Rest of world £20.00)
Order today on + 44 (0)1237 441293
Also available from our online shop: www.resurgence.org/shop
MEM B E R S  G RO U P S & S U P P ORTERS
GAIA GROUPS
Resurgence readers’ opportunity to meet together in local groups, sharing meditation, ideas, an
eco-friendly way of life, and seasonal food. For more information on local groups across the UK,
or to start your own group, contact Jeanette Gill: members@resurgence.org 01208 841824
Birmingham
Contact: Abdul Al-Seffar 0121 426 2606
alseffar@googlemail.com
Meeting 3–4 times a year
East Devon
Contact: Christina 01297 23822
tinabows@hotmail.com
Monthly at The Spiral Sanctuary, Seaton
Hampshire
Contact: Sue Routner 02380 620468
sroutner@yahoo.co.uk
Bi-monthly at The Swan Centre in Eastleigh
Leeds
David Midgley david@schumacher-north.co.uk
Bi-monthly meetings
North Cornwall
Contact: Simon Mitchell 01208 851356
simonthescribe@yahoo.co.uk
Bi-monthly meetings at St Breward
Wales – Newtown area
Contact: Lucy Baird 07850 143737
luciarose@gmail.com
This is a new group – watch this space!
80
TReAD LiGhTLy ON The eARTh
Life, pilgrimage, spirituality and ecology
Featuring
Earth Pilgrim, Satish Kumar
No Destination, Satish Kumar autobiography
Sacred Planet, Resurgence issue 255
Elegant Simplicity, Resurgence issue 254
£5 off voucher for membership to The Resurgence Trust
£22.00 plus p&p
(UK £4.41/EU £9.50/Rest of world £18.75)
Welsh Borders RESURGENCE SUPPORTERS
Contact: Elaine 01981 550246
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Patrons (£5,000)
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Carole Bamford, Roger Franklin, Kim Samuel-
Whitley Bay Group Johnson, Lavinia Sinclair, Doug Tompkins,
Contact: Margaret 0191 290 1516 Michael Watt, Louise White
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Meeting monthly Life Members (£1,000)
Robin Auld, Klaas and Lise Berkeley, Peter
SOUTH AFRICA and Mimi Buckley, Anisa Caine, Mrs Moira
Cape Town Campbell, Anne Clements, Mary Davidson,
Contact: Galeo Saintz +27 (0) 82 888 8181 Liz Dean, Craig Charles Dobson, John Doyle,
galeo@galeosaintz.com John and Liz Duncan, Rosemary Fitzpatrick,
Meeting every two months Hermann Graf-Hatzfelt, Guy Johnson, Michael
Livni, Mill Millichap, Mrs O. Oppenheimer,
SUPPORTING GROUPS Vinod Patel & Rashmi Shukla CBE, John Pontin,
Hemel Hempstead Colin Redpath, Jane Rowse, Gabriel Scally,
Contact: Paul Sandford Tel. 07767 075490 Penelope Schmidt, Philip Strong
paulsandford28@yahoo.co.uk
Meets on the 2nd Wednesday of the month Sustainer Members (£500)
Mr G. Bader, Mrs K. Dudelzak, Marcela de
Shetland
Montes
Contact: Chris Dumont
chris.dumont1@btinternet.com
Monthly meetings
January/February 2011
 at the heart of earth, art and spirit

Resurgence encourages inspiration for a more beautiful world

where soil, soul and society are in harmony with each other

EDITORIAL OFFICE ADVERTISING TRUSTEES

Editor-in-Chief Advertising Manager Chair James Sainsbury
Gwydion Batten Sandy Brown, Rebecca Hossack, Nick Robins,
Satish Kumar
Advertising Sales Thomas Wolf
PA to Satish Kumar Andrea Thomas
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