VIDEO: Estuary Bioregionalism

Estuary Festival have now uploaded the recording of my May 23rd 2021 talk for Focal Point Gallery on ‘Estuary Bioregionalism’.

Those who have attended a Permaculture Design Course I’ve worked on in the last few years or been at the Bioregionalism workshop I hosted at the UK Permaculture Convergence in Manchester will find a lot of the material familiar but I’ve added some new visuals and more material specific to the Dengie Bioregion and a wider estuarine framing.

I removed the explicitly permaculture orientation I normally apply, and tried to drop the in-group language which easily accretes in speaking to a permaculture audience, implicitly it remains.

I found myself surprisingly nervous – partly because I was presenting this material in a different context and partly because the livestream technology the festival was using was unfamiliar after a few years of using Zoom. Pros: their excellent support staff, a virtual green room, live captioning and BSL. Cons: had to send my slideshow to them a couple of days beforehand (I love to tweak right until the end and hate having 48 hours to think of changes I can’t make!) and I had to operate the slide show from a virtual clicker of my phone through a separate log-in – which was haptically unaccustomed and had a slight, but disconcerting, lag.

Anyway, I hope that the record of the talk is useful. I wanted to say more about the Dengie and I may have buried the lede in my Bioregional 101 stuff. If you’re here you can find out more about my Dengie thinking in other posts on the site. Shifting Shores might be a good place to start.

Shifting Shores

Asheldham Brook, salt marsh side of the sea wall

Today’s Guardian has an article on how the National Trust’s decision not to fix sea defences at Cwm Ivy on the North Gower in south Wales has created a salt marsh rich in flora and fauna.

It was an un-managed retreat initially, a hole in the sea defences was created by Atlantic storms in 2013, but the Trust has not tried to hold-the-line, but instead to let natural processes take their course. The article mentions the Trust’s ‘Shifting Shores‘ policy – an admirable approach which seeks to adapt and work with nature rather than against it.

Continue reading “Shifting Shores”

Local Politics for Local People

‘The political economies of the future will be essentially local’
David Fleming


Thanks to all the folk who voted for me in the Essex County Council elections and to the small group of local people in Maldon District Green Party who all volunteered their time and energy to making sure the electorate had clear Green voices to vote for across the three Divisions in Maldon District.

Representing a national party means you’ve got a connection to voices in Parliament that are voting and campaigning on issues that have an effect locally: issues like cuts to local government finance, and the National Planning Policy Framework – which lurk behind our local infrastructure and overdevelopment problems.

Continue reading “Local Politics for Local People”