It’s seven years since we moved to Burnham-on-Crouch now, enough that we’re both more settled than either of us had been for many years before. We know the place and we know people, we’re wiser to the stories and characters of a five-mile radius. One or both of us have become involved in groups here, most often Claire leading the way: archaeological digs, the Burnham Art Trail, Covid mutual aid, the Dengie Hundred Bus Users Group, Maldon Greens, the Maldon & Heybridge Transport User Group.
I was pleased to see the ‘East Atlantic Flyway‘ among the seven sites recently backed by the UK government for Unesco world heritage status and the recognition of the ecological importance of the east coast wetlands that stretch from the Humber to the Thames.
This oriental margin is the terraqueous zone I wrote about in Managed Retreat #1, a fudge of ‘warpings, flats, carrs, fenlands, broads, salt marshes, intertidals, littoral zones and the drowned lands of the London-Brabant Massif’. In the tamed realm of these islands, it’s one of those places where the self-willed still pierces the fabric of the human superstructure, where civilization is thinner.
Continue reading “East Atlantic Flyway”
There was a heat dome over the north. It was in the news about the USA and Canada, but it’s also been in the Russian Arctic, Scandinavia, in the febrile crescent above the Arabian Sea arcing from Oman to Pakistan. A couple of weeks ago, during a Zoom call with a colleague in Milan she mentioned it had been 41°C there in the previous week. Temperature records have been broken in British Columbia, Washington, Portland, Moscow, Lappland, Helsinki, Northern Ireland. All this in a ‘cool’ La Niña year.
Continue reading “New Vernaculars”
‘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”
Lots of the local ecologically concerned folk are sharing this news story based on the
Climate Central flood map update using the CoastalDEM® v1.1 digital elevation model. I’m not immune to doing so myself. Combined with the recent devastating floods in the north of England these projections seem to offer a warning from the future that Continue reading “Vulnerable to Flooding”
I had a dream last night: I was tasked with capturing a wild black beast that was inside a suburban home. I stood outside the porch of the house with a small dog – as it had been determined that the dog’s presence would calm the beast. I opened the porch door and Continue reading “Super Blood Wolf Moon”
It’s now ten days since I wrote to my District Councillors (Peter Elliott and Ron Pratt) asking why Maldon District Council has no current Environment and Climate Change Strategy despite the Climate Emergency and I’m still waiting for a reply. I recognise that they may be busy, that it’s not a salaried role and their time may be stretched, so I think I’ll give them a month before I follow up with another letter seeking an update on progress. I’m also thinking about other ways I can raise this issue – ask the leader of the opposition on the council to raise it?, seek recognition at the town council level? Again, learning how local politics works is proving to be a case of just try stuff.
The urgency of the emergency was brought home last week with Continue reading “High (Tide) and Dry”
Yesterday I attended the Oxford Real Farming Conference, primarily to attend the session on bioregions which featured a panel chaired by Isabel Carlisle of the Bioregional Learning Centre and included Green Party MEP Molly Scott Cato, the writer John Thackara, and my friend Andy Goldring – the Permaculture Association CEO. I’ll try and capture more of what I learned in a subsequent post, but hearing Molly Scott Cato speak reminded me that I had reviewed her book The Bioregional Economy; Land, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for Permaculture Magazine back in October 2014, but that they never ended up publishing it.
Here’s that review: Continue reading “Bioregional Economy”
This morning I’ve been thinking about the ‘Preston Model’ and how this model of ‘new municipalism’ might inform bioregional praxis – with special attention to how it might work out here on the Dengie. In my workshop on bioregionalism at the UK Permaculture Convergence in September I briefly mentioned the Preston Model as a possible technique that might emerge as appropriate from a bioregional design and now seems a good time to think some more about that. I’m generally not keen on beginning with a technique and working backwards but going through some survey and analysis of the local economy with the model in mind may help reveal aspects that would otherwise be unapparent. Continue reading “Community Wealth Building”
On 8th December I posted on social media about trying to find a point of agency in the face of the wicked problem of climate change – partly re-energised by the Extinction Rebellion actions:
‘I’ve never been a member of a political party, I’ve always been against it on the basis that joining a political party seemed to indicate you supported implicitly everything their representatives ended up saying or doing, no matter how idiotic, and even the barmiest parts of their manifestos. No thanks, I favoured the Groucho Marxist position. Continue reading “Climate Emergency”
Dengie Bioregion 