This week, the Greater Essex devolution consultation opened – part of the fast-track reorganisation of local governance. The consultation concerns the proposal to form a Mayoral Combined County Authority for the local government areas of Essex County Council, Thurrock Council and Southend-on-Sea City Council. An area it calls ‘Greater Essex’ but once was just called Essex. The first election for a Mayor is scheduled to take place in May 2026 – in 15 months.
The consultation does not concern the proposals for new unitary local government replacing the existing two-tier system, where services are split between a county and district council. This seems like replacing one two-tier system with another one: county & districts replaced with mayoralty & unitary authorities. Suffice it to say, they are not taking a bioregional approach.
Monday. Community Led Energy Planning Teams call with ECC and Joolz. Also discussed the Dengie Marshes Wind Farm and the possibility of a community asset stake. The more I think about it the more concerned I am about the work necessary if eMpower got involved – especially as I was the only eMpower person on the call – maybe planning around the £600k pa community benefit fund would be a better approach. I saw some anti-wind posting in a local FB group where the poster was saying they would be as tall as the Eiffel Tower – a bit of an exaggeration I thought but I looked up a comparison graphic and (at up to 225m) they would be a significant fraction of the height – plus there could be 17 of them. I find them aesthetically pleasing but 17 two-thirds Eiffel Tower scale turbines would be a dramatic change to the skyline. *Having gone up the Eiffel Tower last month, this was actually a useful comparator).
Monday. C is distributing tree whips to people across the Dengie, she hasn’t had any photos/locations back yet though to map this little forest initiative.
Tuesday. Sorting out details for Riverwatch attendance at the February DCAP meet. Arranging time to talk with Gilly St Lawrence about the March meeting there.
Tuesday. Chasing ECC about dates of LTP4 consultation part 2. Some emails with Mary-Ann Munford and John McCarthy about putting in a bid to Essex Cycle Grant for a feasibility study on the Burnham-on-Crouch – Southminster cycle route. I sent a speculative email to Sustrans to see if they could do one and what the costs would be.
Tuesday. I read the updates from Sarah Green’s Organics that come in the vegbox – the recent rain has allowed them to draw on Bradwell Brook and fill their reservoir. The asynchronous water capture of winter rain is essential with the increasingly dry summers out here
Thursday. Teams call with Gilly re : St Lawrence DCAP meet in March. There’s a possibility that Andy Wright from Essex Wildlife Trust will come to speak about the seagrass restoration project and what else is happening in this part of Essex
Friday- Climate Action Partnerships catch-up call. Heybridge & Maldon Climate Action Partnership are thinking about changing its name to reach a wider audience that isn’t attracted by the current framing. The name HUMAN4NATURE was posited. It made me think about the Burnham Town Council meeting earlier in the week where I had heard some audience guffawing when ‘Net-zero’ was mentioned (they guffawed at the mention of a Covid-19 victim’s remembrance day as well). It also made me think about some recent interactions in a local Facebook group where the idea of the UK taking any climate mitigation action was roundly dismissed and wrapped up with culture war issues and the evils of foreign aid. Climate action is clearly now understood to be in the Woke area of the political spectrum and another nonsense to be dismissed by RUK fans. Later in the day, I watched a Nate Hagens video where he posited that ‘facts and values will not overcome traits and human behaviour and structures’ and spoke about the differences between ‘how the world ought to be and how it is’ – ‘facts and values are important but not sufficient for the times we are living in’ ‘facts and values are no longer sufficient to steer humanity away from the more dystopian outcomes’. He also mentioned, concerning communicating about some topics, that there are things he won’t say publicly because he doesn’t ‘want the Eye of Sauron focussing on Red Wing, Minnesota’ [where he lives]. I’m feeling the Eye of Sauron on me a bit lately.
Friday. I reflected on Heybridge Cllr Paul Spencely’s comments about Heybridge population size after new developments are completed – while she says ‘Heybridge is not a town’ – the imminent population increases will take it over 10k and therefore make it an ‘urban’ place in the UK government terminology.
Friday- I represented the Dengie Hundred Bus Users Group again on a Teams call about the Love Your Bus grant application. There was low attendance though – just the convenor from BTC, Mayowa from Mayland and me – so the meeting was cut short, which suited me – on too many calls lately.
Sunday – Zoom call with Mary-Ann and John about my contact with Sustrans, the questions Sustrans threw back at us, what do we mean by feasibility study? etc.
Day Job
Someone from Digital did the weekly internal editorial blog and wrote about Conway’s Law
Tuesday. dentists – all good, but booked hygienist for next week. Tuesday eve. BTC meeting – the first with all the new councillors. There was an agenda item question regarding community groups making free use of the council chamber – it felt rather pointed, as DCAP was singled out as being a group with no BTC representative on it and Cllr Stamp challenged its right to free use of the space. In other news, the EV chargers are finally going to be completed in Providence car park.; there will be no renewal of the Station House lease; there was no clear answer on whether tey are going to do No Mow May or not. New councillors Les Macdonald and Tory guy were jointly appointed to the Environment role on the council. One of the new RUK guys didn’t turn up and didn’t send an apology (turns out he’s quite active on TikTok though) – one of the shy Tories sent an apology – it was the first meeting in which they could participate and they were no-shows. In the public forum section, I didn’t make friends when I raised concerns about some loose communications regarding the recent elections. The secret squirrel section closed to the public was about devolution – the implication from earlier chatter is that the end of District Councils in Essex means local assets (eg. Riverside Park, car parks etc.) and possibly extra responsibilities will devolve to town/parish councils – assume some budget comes with – wait to see on this one.
Wednesday troubled sleep. I had a vivid dream in which I went lucid and had cause to pull myself out. On FB I posted something about reinsurance companies saying that the UK needs to spend £31 billion a year on flood defences – a pertinent subject for a flood risk area that got inundated in 1953 – and presented it as an example of what RUK’s ‘we just have to adapt’ agenda means in practice – it stirred up the standard responses from the standard men – mainly Nige can do no wrong types trying to talk about foreign aid or some other confection. Where factual errors were being presented I countered, and I tried to take a couple of commentators down the logical path of their statements. It gives me no pleasure to relay that straight-up climate denial is alive and well in Burnham-on-Crouch.
Last night’s council nonsense and this FB melee – both set against the latest Trump and Musk drivel, the situation in Gaza, the general rise of the Fash, and Rafael Behr’s Guardian article – boiled my brain. I went out for a walk, musing on whether there was value in saying anything about anything these days and whether protecting my own mental health needed to be prioritised. C and I talk about a lot of this but there’s only so much stuff your partner can take and I miss some larger group of affinity I could talk this shit out with.
Saturday: C and I took the bus to Danbury and then walked to Maldon through ‘The Wilderness’ (got some Shinrin-yoku) and via The Cats public house. The Cats isn’t open much, only takes cash and this was the first time the stars aligned for us – it was open and we had cash. It’s a wonderfully eccentric country pub that you don’t see the like of much anymore. Afterwards, cold rain that wanted to be sleet accompanied us for the last stretch past Beeleigh Abbey and we stopped for another at The Carpenter’s Arms in Maldon before catching the bus home.
Sunday: Blood donation in the morning in South Woodham, #59. They were running late which meant that I had to launch and chair the Zoom call I was hosting on my phone while I was still laid up pumping claret.
Media
Films
Elevation – Amazon post-apocalypse fare. More of the same that we’ve seen before. This one is only 18 months after the event, so I gave them a break on the cars – but it’s amazing/appropriate that in American post-apocalypses the essentials of society remain automobiles, firearms and packaged foods. You generally get a few nods to foraging and periculture but the dish of the day tends to be pulled from an abandoned kitchen cupboard, a defunct vending machine or a supermarket shelf – ‘Mac n’ cheese’ (Elevation), a can of coke (The Road), canned food (Walking Dead) etc. Americans were always already eating like the world had fallen.
TV
Severance S02E05 Trojans Horse – lots of elements point away from my ‘their consciousnesses are inside the computer’ hypothesis but I’m holding on to it. Folk who think that Lumon is doing cloning will find more to support that idea.
Yellowjackets S03E01 and S03E02 Cristina Ricci is still great but I’m not feeling this series yet.
Books
Finding it hard to sit down and read.
Music
On the Yellowjackets trip
Online
I loved the mega library in the latest Srsly Wrong podcast: Morning in Utopia
Les bibliothèques ou la barbarie!
Future Thinking and Dreaming
Found this paragraph early on in the Webb’s book The King’s Highway (1913)
I posed a question on the microblog sites: ‘Creative trespass and wild camping are the most well-known techniques of Tactical ruralism, what else is the toolbox?’
I don’t think it’s helpful to just list a bunch of things with the prefix wild appended though – wild camping, wild swimming, wild foods etc. I’m trying to imagine something other than that – but what? Some tactical urbanism techniques apply equally, but what are the rural opportunities. Guerilla grafting? guerilla rewilding?
I thought that the rich countries going for ‘net zero’ by 2050 was analogous to elite athletic teams having the goal of an as yet unborn competitor winning a bronze medal in six Olympics time while secretly just hoping that they qualify for the Games.
I pondered what the Faragist Project 2029 looks like
the existence of the Veluwemeer Aqueduct gives me hope for the world – but make that road a railway!
Aquaduct Veluwemeer in the Veluwe lake near Harderwijk
Over the weekend we received the disappointing news from Essex County Council that they were unwilling to let the Burnham Library Orchard project go ahead, with some not very detailed reasons about ‘infrastructure’ which seem to pertain to the library building itself which would have been unaffected by the proposal.
Burnham-on-Crouch Library
Tuesday. The Dengie Hundred Bus Users Group (DHBUG) monthly meeting. Hints that the D1 bus might be under threat of being withdrawn now, another hit to Dengie services.
Wednesday – I signed some documents as part of the process of formally registering eMpower Maldon as a Community Benefit Society. John Philpot’s done most of the admin work getting us to this point. We should be registered before the Community Led Energy Planning meeting in Maldon town in March.
The proposed Dengie Marshes Wind Farm is moving forward into a phase of public survey and persuasion. (A company called Dengie Marshes Wind Farm Limited was incorporated on 18 October 2024 and shares directors with Blenheim Renewables, the company which initiated the project.)
The project has a website and is holding a series of consultation events with two scheduled for this week:
Thursday 6th February 15:00 – 19:00 Southminster Memorial Hall, Southminster, CM0 7DE
Saturday 8th February 12:00 – 16:00 Burnham Village Hall, 2 Arcadia Road, Burnham-on-Crouch CM0 8EF
They aim to submit a planning application this ‘summer’.
We had our monthly meeting on Thursday and tried to do some Thermal Imaging of 4 homes at the same time – which was ambitious. The only way to make it work was to split the group in two and I wasn’t really happy with things working out that way. Earlier in the week I spent some time looking through Parish Plans and Neighbourhood Development Plans from across the Dengie looking for opportunities and commitments.
Jo Coombes and I have been working on an idea I’m tentatively calling ‘Looking out for Nature’ inspired by the work that Wild Justice did identifying that ‘Nearly half of the nature-friendly enhancements promised by developers building new homes have failed to materialise’. I shared this report on local social media and suggested that because Maldon District Council has no professional ecologists on staff it was in high peril of developers not fulfilling their legal biodiversity commitments. I got a comment that ‘MDC Planning employs Planning Enforcement Officers who are responsible for investigating developments where planning has not been granted and checking that planning conditions attached to planning approvals have actually been carried out. Where a condition regarding trees or bird box has been inserted then they would check the compliance’ with a link to the Planning Enforcement. If you actually look at the Planning Enforcement site though it doesn’t support the claim that Planning Enforcement are proactive and makes checks. ‘ Their own overview description of their work simply states: ‘The planning enforcement team has responsibility for investigating complaints [my emphasis] principally where unauthorised development has taken place and aims to resolve these using the most appropriate means.’ i.e. they are reactive. It’s impossible to see how planning authorities like Maldon will be able to assess whether developments meet the 10% biodiversity gain
This places the responsibility to identify breaches with concerned citizens, hence the project. Do we really have the capacity to do it though?
Dengie Bioregion 