By Hazel Draper

There’s no time to waste when it comes to the climate and nature crisis!  This urgency is borne out by the scientific data and media reports from both around the world and in the UK.  It is why I have seen so many of my friends working tirelessly to do everything within their power to respond – to throw all they can at salvaging the situation to avoid catastrophe for people and all living things.
 
This response is based upon an important belief: namely that life is worth saving - that nature and everything within it is precious, some may even say sacred.  This principle is at the heart of all that we do as climate and nature activists. That said, there is an epidemic of forgetfulness surrounding it: how often do you forget that you are part of nature too? That you are also precious? That you are also worth protecting?
 
Whilst we, quite rightly, rage against the extractivist culture which has led us to the crisis we are in, we are still of a mindset where we will take and take from our own mind, body and spirit to do the job at hand.  When protecting the world around us, we too often forget to protect ourselves.
 
To rest is therefore a potent act.  It not only avoids burn out, but also reminds us that we need to change our mindset.  We need to honour not only the planet but also ourselves and other members of our community rather than pushing everything and everyone towards breaking point.  This is not new thinking: Tricia Hersey explores in detail the idea that ‘Rest is Resistance’ in her book of that name; Audre Lorde wrote about self-care as a radical act; and – going back even further – the Judeo-Christian tradition has an all-powerful God making the significant choice to rest on the seventh day.
 
For those of us who are not all-powerful, to rest is often easier said than done.  We live in a system where we have been conditioned to measure our worth by our productivity.  Even where we have broken away from this idea, there is still a sense in which we feel worthless when we fail to do ‘enough’.  The very idea of pausing from action when we are faced with the existential threat of the climate and nature crisis is overwhelming to us – because to be acting is often our only means of coping.
 
This was brought into stark relief for me when I was hit with long covid and was forced to begin living a life of pacing and pausing and resting.  To be put into a situation where I had to sit with the world’s issues and stare them down rather than leap into action was unbelievably hard.  It is an experience that many in our community will face at times in our lives – be it due to illness, ageing, caring commitments, or other life events.  However, by understanding the power of rest and by embracing it in our lives right now, it can help to not only prevent the shock of enforced rest should it occur, but also profoundly change our understanding of the world.
 
When you begin to understand the importance of rest, then you begin to listen.  
 
You listen out for what your body is telling you in a more holistic way because you recognise not only the worth of what the hand needs to do but also what the head needs and what the heart needs.  This offers up far more than just taking time out so that you can be more productive on your return, it offers up a new way of understanding ourselves and the world around us, a way of reflecting on what is truly of worth.
 
Just as we have been conditioned to measure our worth by our productivity rather than our intrinsic worth, the same is also true of the land.  In challenging the mindset of asking what the land can do for us, what might happen when we listen to what the land is telling us?
 
The 2023 State of Nature Report found that wildlife in England has declined in abundance by 32% since 1970 and 13% of the species assessed in the report are threatened with extinction.  The land is screaming out to us that it is in trouble, that our actions as a species have disrupted balance and that things must change.  But if we listen to the places where nature is flourishing, we begin to recognise that it is in the places where the land is left to just be. To be at rest and to be acting when and where needed without exhaustive demands on productivity is to thrive.  We must begin to appreciate the intrinsic value in this.

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By Christian Climate Action

By Jonny Venvell

By Rebecca Lindsay​

On the 22nd June Wild Card joined a passionate community of environmentalists, climate scientists and nature enthusiasts in central London as official supporters of the Restore Nature Now march. We united with over 150 supporting organisations - The Wildlife Trusts, the RSPB, the Woodland Trust, etc - to deliver five key messages to our government:

1. A pay rise for nature

Nature can’t be restored without sufficiently supporting the hardworking farmers that manage 70% of UK land. We need to double the budget for nature and climate-friendly farming.

1. Make polluters pay

Huge polluting businesses contribute hugely to environmental decline. We want to see companies from water to retail contribute to nature and climate recovery, following new rules that hold them to higher standards and end the usage of fossil fuels. 

1. More space for nature

The rights of our green spaces are increasingly under threat. Of all UK land and water, only 3% and 8% are properly protected, respectively. To regenerate our natural environment and meet our climate commitments, we need to expand and improve protected areas, and ensure public land and National Parks contribute more to recovery.

1. A right to a healthy environment

Limited access to nature, and pollution in the air and water, affects everyone’s health. We’re calling for an Environmental Rights Bill which would drive better decisions for nature and improve public health by keeping our environment free of nasty chemicals and gatekeepers.

1. Fair and effective climate action

We cannot save nature without solving the climate crisis. We want investment in warm homes and lower bills by increasing home energy efficiency, supporting active travel and public transport, and replacing polluting fossil fuels with affordable renewables to ensure we at least halve UK emissions by 2030.

As Wild Card it’s important to us to express solidarity in demanding a nature-first approach to policymaking in the age of the climate crisis - especially less than two weeks before a general election. In the spirit of optimistic change, we donned our flags and wild cardigans and headed to Hyde Park Corner. 

By Elena Grice, Wild Card Communities and Campaigns Lead

Rewilding, taking the traditional view, conjures up certain images. A caramel flash of a Lynx to a
backdrop of Scots Pine. Herds of Tauros, rumbling across Portugal. Maybe even elephants,
reintroduced into Europe, as some suggest is needed. 1

Sit 100 people in a room and ask them to define Rewilding. You’ll hear some overlap, some of these
common themes, but you’ll most likely have 100 different answers recited back at you.
It is widely accepted that in the UK, our landscapes are denuded. Our hairy, tusked, and hooved
stewards are largely extinct, as are the shifting worlds they created. An absence of life hangs heavy
on our country, the silence deafening. We have, for all intents and purposes, domesticated our lands,
cheating them of their essential wildness.

And in the tandem with this, is something little talked about. A domestication of ourselves.
Like our landscapes, perhaps our minds, bodies, and even cities are denuded? Cheated of an
essential wildness.

Technology moves faster than biology, and despite feeling detached (or even worse superior) to
nature, the modern-day human has been around for an eye-blink in deep time.

In 2016, a study at Nagoya University took images of several animals and blurred each into a grey
smear. Stage by stage, they then unblurred each, and asked a group of pupils when they could
identify each creature. Remarkably, snakes were identified first across the board. 2 An evolutionary
hack, programmed for when we had to forage on the ground?

In Britain we also have an infatuation with the big, black, cat. Theories that Puma and Pantha are
roaming wild in our countryside. However, decades of military searches on, it’s clear these are false. 3
So, why are some people still so insistent that they’re there? That they’re being stalked by an invisible
predator.

Well, perhaps they are. Perhaps there is a big black cat, but in their minds. Stalking the shadows of a
predator, an evolutionary paranoia. As Author George Monbiot says: “maybe, we are ecologically
bored”.

Our own brains are calling out to be rewilded, but so is our land. And by that, I don’t mean fortress
conservation, the notion of “humans here, and nature over there somewhere”. Like Beavers and
Boars, we are ecosystem engineers, an integral part of the modern-day ecosystem. If anything, we’re
too good at it!

Even in the 21 st Century, people unintentionally steward the land for good. Urban gardens have been
shown to be more biodiverse than surrounding landscapes. 4 In some seabird colonies, locals provide
an anti-predator service, deterring certain predators; affording others respite. 5 In the Bronze Age,
when farming was prevalent, pollen cores reveal it was in fact the most biodiverse period in recent
history, due to the ways humans and livestock managed the land. 6

So, when we talk about rewilding, we should refer not only to the glens and scrublands, the bleak
tundras, and bustling wood pastures. Our gardens, cities and farms can also be rewilded, with us as
the ecosystem engineers, to get things started at least.
​
Such that a mycelial body nurtures the subterranean world of a woodland, which in turn provides it
with a suitable habitat, we as human beings must nurture our anthropogenic world back to health, so
that it can provide us with the habitat we need. To rewild our surroundings, we must first allow our
surroundings to rewild ourselves. The ultimate Symbiosis.

If this topic interests you and you’d like to get involved, you can find out more/get in touch with the
Symbiosis project here: (watch this space)

References:
1. Wells, H., Ward, N. and D. Crego. (2023) Rewilding: Conservationists want to let elephants loose in
Europe – here’s what could happen, theconservation.com. Available at:
https://theconversation.com/rewilding-conservationists-want-to-let-elephants-loose-in-europe-heres-
what-could-happen-168212 (Accessed: 03 March 2024).
2. Neuroscience News. (2016, November 8). Humans recognize partially obscured snakes more
easily than other animals. https://neurosciencenews.com/snake-recognition-vision-5460/
3. Monbiot, G. (2014). The never-spotted leopard. In Feral (p. pg. 49-61). essay, Penguin.
4. World Economic Forum. (2021, February 21). Why urban gardens are a lifeline for the world’s
pollinators. www.weforum.org. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/02/urban-gardens-pollinators-
biodiversity-nectar-
study/#:~:text=Our%20findings%20suggest%20that%20urban%20landscapes%20are%20hotspots,th
e%20farmland%20and%20nature%20reserve%20sites%20we%20measured.
5. Unknown. (2022, July 17th). Word of mouth from ornithological conservationist. Thetford; The
Global Birdfair 2022.
6. Woodbridge , D. J. (2023). Biodiversity and land-use change in the British Isles. University of
Plymouth. https://www.plymouth.ac.uk/research/centre-for-research-in-environment-and-society-
ceres/biodiversity-and-human-land-use-change-in-the-british-isles

I'​ve come to realise, friends, that even some of the most influential speakers and writers of words on climate do not understand even the basics of Earth as an entire dynamic system of systems.


I go further and say that a repetitive use of the word climate as the dominant meme is now serving LIFE poorly. LIFE is mutualism en masse, symbiosis as a continued wave down deep in the rock to surprisingly high in the atmosphere. This is why I have coined the word symbioethics. 


Please, think about how you use the word climate, despite the big crowds in high politics going on and on because of pressure to “do” something as opposed to “nothing”. They aren’t system thinkers. Their goals are linear and flat. In terms of Earth Crisis/es, they are the Flat Earthers. Neoliberalism is particularly exploiting the situation; it’s raw like drawing blood. To these people, carbon and carbon dioxide are exchangeable units to trade, and mass electrification means Business-As-Usual in all other aspects of LIFE. There’s blood all over the place, and more to spill.


All aspects of modern life, I’m almost afraid to say it, are what led to the invention of fossil fuel exploitation in the first place, and hence the unfurling, energized, continuing nightmare that is Earth Crisis. Climate change is a symptom, not the disease. You have to recognise this, surely, because those politicians and capitalists may have less of a clue than you.


Earth is different as a planet because of LIFE. I’m animating LIFE in capitals, so as to know and perhaps feel your way into how things really are. I don’t care much about these competitive and anxiolytic obsessions with targets and meeting them, just please stop for a moment and take this in.


LIFE came about because of LIFE.


Sure, it took long-gone, variable qualities of non-organic systems, the chance events of matter, including water, reacting and compounding billions of years ago until an opportunity existed for the emergence of early RNA-like substances, DNA, viruses, and bacteria and cells. In certain conditions again, perhaps under a newly generated organic methane shroud, like smog to deter ultra-violet violence, these basic cells merged again, forming metabolizing and photosynthesizing cells, and in more than one place in similar timescales (symbiogenesis).


LIFE then really took off in this swirling flow of abundance, and when these earliest colonies of dazzling (Lynn Margulis) living matter grew into and around others, more cells found novel roles and began to coalesce in the form of more complex organisms. You only need to understand lichen to realise how it is LIFE that changes the conditions for LIFE. Lichen turns rock into soils; soils are hotbeds for LIFE. And that’s just one example we can all see with our own eyes.


Since those magnificent Earthly points in time and space, LIFE has gained strength by manipulating those very same inorganic and organic systems that produced them, changing them to suit more LIFE (Gaia Theory, even if weak). LIFE has evolved for billions of years subjecting, and being subjected by, the conditions of Earth as a system (Lovelock).


Fast forward three billion years—and five previous extinction events—and here we are, and every living being is still a colony among colonies.


Climate is just one of many interconnected systems that sustain LIFE, though inescapably critical. Its power under change is rage, but the rage should be ours because members of our own species created the volatility, and a minority still pursue it ~ for cash. Climate, on the other hand, simply describes the weather conditions that prevail in general or over a long period. Climate does have the power to let LIFE thrive or die out. But even the atmosphere is largely a product of everything else going on in the world, chiefly… LIFE. Climate is a symptom. As such, it isn’t just physics. The neoliberals, the corporate capitalists, deny it. They may have begun to engage under pressure, at last, but it is only on their terms ~ cash.


Let’s look at LIFE instead.


What are the LIFE supporting systems?


LIFE on Earth is symbiotically related to several Earth and cosmological systems, which are mainly energized by the Sun, our aspect towards the Sun, but sometimes by sources from within the Earth itself. These are all intimately related in flows. We can try to separate them for the sake of study, but the reality is a giant existential, moving system, full of subsystems, cycles, and processes. All is relatedness, flow.


On Earth, the main sub-systems are as follows.
Hydrosphere
Geosphere
Biosphere
Atmosphere


Each one is interconnected to the other by processes and cycles, transforming and exchanging matter and energy over time from the nano-second into deep time.


Evaporation, erosion, convection currents, transpiration, photosynthesis, weathering, erosion, rock formation, ocean currents, climate…no beginning nor end. Carbon, sulphur, salt, food, nitrogen, water, energy, cycled on into LIFE and back again, including human LIFE, which can’t exist without them all.


There are even more systems and processes, macro and micro, even sub micro and meta macro, many of which we have no understanding nor measure. But we know the consequences of them – LIFE on Earth. Sometimes, we have to imagine. Or simply trust in them. But this means leaving soft imprints everywhere we go, or none at all.


SIXTH Extinction Event – Humans.


Scientists relay via peer review evidence that we are into Earth’s sixth extinction event. This includes leviathan climate change.


The five previous extinction events we know about because of the rock record, have been initially caused by activity outside of the organic experience. We know there are historic “orbital” rhythms to climate, which we call the Milankovic Cycles, named after the scientist who mooted the theory, and we know that vulcanicity, tectonic drift, and even giant comet strikes have all altered the stasis of Earth’s spectacularly unified systems that sustain a gradual flow of LIFE.


The problem is that we humans have so manipulated all four of Earth’s main systems that we are changing global stasis and therefore climate (for the sake of argument, the conditions of life as we understand them) earlier and faster than it would otherwise do so. And it is happening so quickly, driven by a power-crazed minority that wrongly perceives accumulation of wealth as the aim. Climate is the global feedback as are ocean currents slowing due to melting ice, displacement of bacterial and photosynthetic drivers of certain cycles, including changing salinity. Yes. Climate change IS heating and weirding and will create more torment and suffering to LIFE, because of the feedback loops in linked systems, like the hydrosphere (flooding, drought, etc).


Existential LIFE on Earth is inherently magnificent. It is so even without humans considering it merely here to serve our needs. But that magnificence is being killed off by humans through overreach in all aspects. All kinds of human development block the flows of LIFE, the processes, and relationships that sustain communities. Climate change so far (no nuclear winters just yet) is a result of the destruction of living and geological systems that trap carbon in long cycles.  Significant anthropogenic (human-caused) changes have happened since the emergence of human agriculture and cities, but sky-rocketing because of the industrial revolution, wide-scale fossil fuel emissions, and a rapid greenhouse effect. Smothering soils with tarmac and concrete, burning peat, harvesting woodland, churning out pollution and waste, fragmenting all kinds of ecosystems with hard infrastructure and agriculture, killing sea LIFE ~ all effects the carbon cycle. Space Capitalism is exacerbating all. This is not just about climate!


Kill off LIFE, and we kill off ourselves. Remember, we are all communities within communities. Nothing is separate.


There are signs and signals everywhere that something is seriously wrong with the systems that sustain LIFE as we understand them, the global COVID19 pandemic in humans being simply the latest. Many more exist beyond the human realm if only more of us understood.


Words matter.


Human words are critical in how we relate experience to one another, but are also significantly powerful over all other LIFE forms because that’s the state of play right now ~ human dominion over all LIFE. I’m sick of people suggesting to me that words do not matter, despite them using words to try to communicate that fact. Your words, my words, act as communication capsules fronting deep memory, transformation, emotions, belonging and doing. They can be used as weapons, salves, or instruments of new ways of thinking. Words do matter, especially those repeated and repeated in the public sphere. We should be way more aware of their power.


I’d like to hear the word LIFE just as much, if not more, than the word CLIMATE. It is LIFE that is ultimately of profound worth, even though a clement climate is ideal for life in different regions as we understand it now. To avoid LIFE and its diversity in our language allows human power structures to focus only on CO2 in the atmosphere like a currency and climate as if it were still dissociated with all those systems that sustain LIFE.


Climate this and climate that. Even critical areas such as justice and equity aren’t adequately served well by its narrow framing. Just look at water and food supply, and the terrible inequities of pollution streams. Some solutions to fit the climate narrative even go so far as to kill more LIFE when LIFE is the evolutionary response to climate warming. Curtail LIFE and you are doubling, tripling the problem.


Systems thinking, please, and in the use of language. To continue isolating the language of climate is a folly. It is a kind of othering, something difficult to handle for almost everyone else. Too big, too ethereal. Something only for learned and passionate experts, or politicians.


The way we live our lives in community, as community among many communities (human and teresapien), is the change. This will help steady the symptom of climate change, though we know the genie has already let rip. It will critically help LIFE in mutualisms and flows. Teachers can be a huge part of facilitating that community change by example. As can any local government, library or hospital officer with responsibility for public buildings and grounds. I’ve little faith in private, competitive interests (at the heart of Capitalism), but maybe there is some hope here. I will wait to see if the practice of locaceding is accepted. Meanwhile, Governments can help or hinder, but the change must be a groundswell. At the moment, voting records still show contempt and apathy from the ground. They will take heart from this, and carry on ignoring LIFE.


It is my greatest hope that Fluminism, on the other hand, is a positive word from the get-go. As a symbioethic, it relates easily to all flowing mutualisms, processes, cycles, and systems that sustain and proliferate LIFE in diversity and abundance. As a word with meaning, I use it as a resistance to those Earth scarring ways of perceiving, being, and doing in this world. It’s a treatment of the disease and the symptom. Perhaps you might use it too. Once understood, it is do-able by everyone equally and daily, and a perception of the world that is then very difficult to un-know.


~~~~
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Originally posted at: https://seasonalight.com/2021/05/10/on-climate-as-the-dominant-meme/