Category: Fellow Travellers

Beneath the Seawall, the Beach of Dreams

James Piers Taylor4 Comments
Photograph of the walkers paused by the entombed Bradwell Nuclear Power Station to hear Angenita Teekens speak.
The walk pauses by the entombed Bradwell Nuclear Power Station to hear Angenita Teekens on her mile

Last Sunday I participated in a stage of Beach of Dreams, walking between Bradwell Waterside and Burnham-on-Crouch. Beach of Dreams is an art project initiated by Ali Pretty of Kinetika, it’s a collaborative 500-mile walk between Lowestoft and Tilbury

Continue reading “Beneath the Seawall, the Beach of Dreams” →

Landscape Scale Land Management

James Piers Taylor7 Comments

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Aerial photo over River Crouch taken 30th May 1966 by Simmons Aerofilms https://ncap.org.uk/frame/11-1-2-107a-289?pos=48
(Higher resolution images are available from NCAP)

At the Oxford Real Farming Conference I attended the session ‘Shaping our future together’ organised by CTRLShift and facilitated by Andy Goldring. Rather than a presentation from the front, this session was designed to create a space for collaboration and planning between organisations, practitioners and networks building on the process started in Wigan, March 2018 at the initial CTRLShift: An emergency summit for change event.

The session began with a brief introduction and then encouraged participants to introduce an area of focus they would like to discuss.  Folk then clustered according to which area they found richest and most relevant to them at that time in order to discuss that topic through the lens of three questions: Continue reading “Landscape Scale Land Management” →

Eastern Region Permaculture Gathering

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Screen Shot 2018-08-26 at 15.09.35

Next weekend is the Eastern Region Permaculture Gathering in Norfolk, where I’ll be presenting a workshop on Bioregionalism. I launched Managed Retreat at the first Eastern Region Permaculture Gathering, so in many ways this will be an update on how on my thinking has developed since then. It’s also an opportunity to shine more light on this Dengie Bioregion project and the Confederation of Soviets of the Atlantic Archipelago. Continue reading “Eastern Region Permaculture Gathering” →

Bioregioning: Ed Tyler

James Piers Taylor1 Comment

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Ed Tyler’s Bioregional Food Mapping Session at the National Permaculture Diploma Gathering November 2011

Permaculturalist Ed Tyler has been exploring bioregional action and thought up on his own peninsula in Kintyre. With the name of his blog he has coined a new word for the re-inhabitation lexicon: bioregioning.

He goes on to define the word on the blog About page.

Bioregioning: from verb “to bioregion”; act of bringing your bioregion into existence through:-

 grounding, connecting, celebrating, belonging

This usefully re-positions what can easily become a philosophic exercise in just thinking about bioregions into an action focussed process in manifesting bioregions.

He continues by inviting us to engage with some activities he associated with bioregioning, which I clumsily summarise as:

  • Wander
  • Garden
  • Make connections with nature
  • Make connections with neighbours
  • Celebrate

But it’s really worth reading Tyler’s longer form descriptions. Similarly he lists what Bioregioning involves:

  • slowing down, looking and feeling inward and outward to the land, water, creatures and people around you
  • making music, clothes, buildings, sculptures, relationships, furniture, poems, paintings and other necessities from locally available materials
  • cycling and sharing resources, money and energy within your region
  • growing and eating locally sourced, seasonally abundant, food
  • networking and collaborating with each other to build diverse communities and ecologies

I think that his simple rendering of bioregioning provides a good pointer towards ‘next steps’ after I complete the Bioregional Quiz questions (that’s right, I’ve not forgotten about these!)

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Some of Ed Tyler’s bioregional mapping