At the Edge of the Edge

Space for reading/reviewing emerges again, as the evenings get darker. A log fire is lit in the front room and a glass of homemade elderflower wine makes good company, with a stack of books alongside My blogging silence is also part of feeling what else is there to say about greening Planet Earth that hasn’t been said over and over again! So when new thoughts emerge, then I find a natural need to share same, emerges too!

So here goes – I’m feeling excited about the future again. An explosion of ideas promoting both transformation and transition is spreading, like a beautiful colourful positive mycelium around ‘our’ planet. There are new books galore helping this process. One of these, ‘Permaculture in a Nutshell’ by Patrick Whitefield is a little gem. I am finding much of his comments really uplifting and really humbling. One in particular puts our place in time on the planet in stark and shocking context. He says – “Imagine the entire history of the Earth compressed into one year. It is now midnight on the 31st Dec. Oil has been laid down continuously since about May. We discovered it three seconds ago and in another three seconds we will have used it all up.” Blink! Gone! How extraordinary to exist in this six second interval. What a privilege, yet what a mess we’ve made arising from this privilege!

The transformation/transition challenge, as we step out beyond what Thomas Berry refers to as the brief ‘Petroleum Interval’ in his moving book ‘The Great Work,’ is at the heart of the burgeoning save-the-planet movement.

Meanwhile it is worth dwelling on some of the marvels of the modern technological world, in particular those that have a valid place in celebrating the positive inventiveness of humankind. I must confess, I can’t stop viewing on ‘U-Tube’ a six minute video of one of the word’s biggest and most sophisticated trimarans, which, apparently right on the edge of loosing control, with reduced sails in gale force winds, skips over the Biscay Bay. A modern song called ‘Street Symphony’ sung by the soft voice of a singer called Monica, accompanies the video. One witnesses the mastery of both the helmsman and the architecture of the beautiful craft – dancing, bouncing, and jumping elegantly over the turmoil of the wild seas, over the living skin of the planet. It feels like the edge of the edge of technological limits and inventiveness.

At the other end of the spectrum, and with feet firmly on the ground, I found myself, on the same day as witnessing the above, in one of the little oak copses that we have planted in our seven-acre field. The individual trees needed thinning and ‘pruning.’ After a couple of days work, when the young trees had been loved and preened, a little wood seemed to suddenly appear, resulting in great personal satisfaction and, perhaps strangely, the same thrill and excitement as viewing the trimaran’s graceful sea-dance. Somehow the two extremes seem to be about celebrating the adventure and marvellousness of life – part of leaving behind the ‘six-second-wickedness’ and voyaging towards a long-term stable lasting future, alternative to the present, where we really begin to understand and respect the living dynamic and delicate nature of the planet. We should all move on to design a replacement philosophy that can escape from using the finite environment as a one-off luxury to one which can even demonstrate that humankind, one day soon, could actually be of benefit to the planet! We seem to be at the edge of the edge of doing it!