DCAP
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?
I had some communication with Les Flack in St Lawrence about their new woodland which is getting planted in a few weeks.
I took a look at the most recent BTC minutes (14 January). There was a public question about planting fruit trees on verges.
Can we investigate planting fruit trees and fruit bushes on verges and open spaces to assist in providing a provision for those that may be in need and want to be self-sufficient.
I didn’t attend so unfortunately I don’t know who asked this.
The councillors present apparently decided that this question should be considered alongside a later item – the proposal that BTC adopt the plant-based treaty. The council elected to ‘support the principal of the treaty with a view to implementing the ethos and the net zero aims by 2030’. They also announced that a working party would be set up to review and report back at regular intervals. ‘This will include things such as a resident consultation, planting of fruit trees for public use and discussions with developers.’ Is this kicking it into the long grass? We don’t know, as they acknowledged the request I sent on behalf of DCAP that they engage with No Mow May but the minutes simply record another question ‘Can we investigate No Mow May again this year, and additional trees’
On Friday I missed the Wider Essex Climate Action Network (WE-CAN) Meeting Teams call but I’ve caught up with the slides and now need to write a letter of support for their funding bid.
Sunday. C and I caught the train to Althorne and then walked to Mayland via St Andrews’s Church and The Huntsman and Hounds. Some heavy clay sections. My mind was on how the footpaths here could be upgraded to a cycle path connecting Dengie’s largest settlement-without-a-railway-line to the Crouch Valley line. As the crow flies it is only 4.35 km (2.70 mi) between Althorne railway station and Mayland Post Office – and a lot of the housing is closer still to Althorne. That’s a 16-minute cycle ride at a modest 10mph – an e-bike at the UK limit of 15.5 mph would do that distance in 10.5 minutes.
FP 10 239 (Station Road) – (need safe crossing of Fambridge Road and segregated lane -106m) – FP 3 239 – FP 14 239 – short section of road (Summerhill and Main Road – 311m) – FP 1 239 – cross Green Lane (need safe crossing) – FP 5 250 – cross Steeple Road (need safe crossing and segregated lane -181m) – FP 13 254 – FP 14 254 – short stretch of West Avenue (should be in Home Zone) – unnumbered track to Imperial Avenue
Day Job
I got to do a small amount of proper research for a change. We had some conflicting data on the 1930s serial Lloyd of the C.I.D. which needed sorting out. It was a joy to be back looking through issues of Kine Weekly. Later in the week, tried to answer the question is Robert Egger’s Nosferatu a British film?
On Monday, I briefed the team I’m in on how I thought agentic AI and SLMs might affect our work/take our jobs.
A few more well-established staff left last week. Mostly retirements but some reshuffle too. A lot of people where I work are long-termers (I’ve worked there on and off since 1998), so the staff feel like the foundation. The turnover of lifers is another indicator of my own ageing and the super-longevity available to organisations – 8 years until the institute becomes a centenarian
Everyday Life
Apparently one of the Reform UK candidates has dropped out of the Burnham South Ward election despite a promotional sheet with him on it being delivered to letterboxes the day before. The flyer had both Reform candidates on it, and it’s not clear which one has dropped out. In any case, they’ve dropped out too late for the election not to go ahead, for his name not to appear on the ballot paper or for the expense of an election to have been incurred. It’s fitting that Reform UK’s first impact on the Town Council is chaotic, irresponsible, poorly communicated, mismanaged and needlessly expensive. It would be good to think that this meant we were definitely getting one less Reform UK councillor than we might otherwise have done but he could still get enough votes to win and would then have to turn down the position. It largely looks like both wards are uncontested now though, everyone who stood is getting in – three Reform UK candidates, 4 candidates that have nothing in the ‘Description (if any)’ cell of the election posters but these so-called independents are actually 3 shy Tories and 1 shy Labour
Tuesday – Burnham Art Trail meeting
Wednesday – Labour’s stupid decision on Heathrow Airport, alongside some bullshit about sustainable aviation fuel. Next year it will be 20 years since I last took a flight. People tell me that taking the train places is a luxury and the time it takes to travel that way is something for a privileged few (but somehow cheap flights are neither a luxury nor a privilege).
No doing very well at completing weeknotes at any discernible end of a week.
Media
Films
Watched A Real Pain. Coincidentally it was the Holocaust anniversary. The film’s not really about the Shoah but the brief bit in a Polish concentration camp renewed my anger toward those Nazi cunts and their enablers. It was hard not to ponder exctly what Reform UK supporters would accept.
TV
Severance S02E03. In theory, I’m in favour of the meting out of episodes – 1 a week, imitating broadcast television and making viewing an event – but long-form streaming content is less like episodic TV now and more like a chaptered book. The reader gets to decide on one more chapter or not, why is binge-reading a positive but binge-watching a negative? There was some new weirdness in this episode and I’m starting to ask – ‘you’ve got a story arc, right? this is going somewhere, right?’.
Earth Abides – watched the whole series. It’s an adaptation of George Stewart’s 1949 novel (about which Wikipedia tells you most of what you want to know). A few episodes in, I recognised the influence of expectations I had about this post-apocalyptic scenario derived from The Walking Dead franchise, The Last of Us, Fallout, Station Eleven, Into The Night etc. and the cosy catastrophes fictions. These expectations were subverted because all the strangers turned out to be nice, and fears about them were unfounded. I thought that maybe this was a solarpunkish turn towards everyone basically being Ok and just wanting to get along until E05? when it turns out that was all a narrative head-fake and the cultish Charlie turns up (I assumed this was a cack-handed allusion to Manson, but the novel also call the roughly same character Charlie).
I tend to watch post-apocalyptic fiction through the prepping lens that peak oil brought into focus – asking questions like: ‘How do they have water on tap?’, ‘How come the petrol is still good two decades in and the cars always start first time?’, ‘I saw you plant one raised bed in the back garden, where is the food coming from?’
Some of this is answered as the series goes on. There’s a dam feeding the mains water under gravity from the reservoir behind- which is apparently a real thing that could happen. Someone mentions putting biocide in the gas tank, and a group of people head to ‘the farm’ to work. None of it gets enough attention to convince.
It seems that the settlement of San Lupo in the original novel was based on George Stewart’s own home on San Luis Drive, Berkley. So it’s probably the San Pablo dam in California, just 5km from San Luis Drive fictively feeding the faucets. The series is also set in Berkley but it was filmed in British Columbia, Canada and shows the Cleveland Dam in Vancouver standing in for the San Pablo. In our world, the California reservoirs have been suffering water shortages, and the water from the San Pablo seems to go via the Orinda Water Treatment Plant, where any staff die-off may have troubled the easy passage of water downhill.
I’m kind of fascinated by how often motornormativity survives the apocalypse and how the longer-running franchises eventually have to replenish the tanks with some story about how they’re keeping the cars on the road: Gastown in Mad Max, Tank Town in Fear the Walking Dead, the Madison Square Gardens corpse-methane plant in Walking Dead: Dead City.
Books
Started on my Christmas book – Gareth Dennis’s How the Railways Will Fix the Future: Rediscovering the Essential Brilliance of the Iron Road – it’s excellent so far. I’m a big fan of his Rail Natter vodcast and expected a lot of great insights and information. It’s also well written and I was really pleased to see the ecological contextualisation with none of the regular BAU or eco-modernist bullshit.
Music
Online
I enjoyed Will Menaker on Doom Scroll, and Adam Tooze on Verso vodcast
Dengie Bioregion 