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An article about responsibility, cultural change, justice and equality

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An article about responsibility, cultural change, justice and equality

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I found this very clear and felt it articulates well some of my recent preoccupations. Rather a relief to read, actually. Makes me think I/we are on the right track. Also what an eye opener to realise it was BP who introduced the idea of the personal carbon footprint to deflect attention from their own giant corporate feet! The artilce about fossil fuel companies disinformation campaigns that is linked from this one is also very illumniating.

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What can you do, as a single individual, to help halt global heating? Social science research suggests that one of the most powerful things you can do is talk about the climate crisis in your networks. But according to many climate activists, the one thing you should not do is discuss people's personal carbon footprints.

Talking about individual carbon footprints, these activists argue, is, at best, a distraction from the essential work of raising a climate movement and, at worst, a naive and counterproductive embrace of propaganda developed by oil and gas companies to dishearten people and divert them from building a movement for collective action. But this view of climate communication and carbon footprints rests on the mistaken idea that there is a universal individual whose personal carbon footprint is always an irrelevant distraction. The truth is we need to talk about curbing the individual carbon footprints of the rich in order to halt global heating.

First, let's look at the argument that it's bad to talk about personal carbon footprints. In the early 2000s, the major oil company BP weaponized the scientific concept of the carbon footprint, placing it at the center of a multimillion-dollar advertising campaign that made resolving the climate crisis a matter of individuals reducing their consumption. The effect of their strategy was and is to make people feel personally responsible not only for causing the climate crisis by simply living their lives, but also for solving it by no longer driving or flying or eating beef or using plastic straws or whatever the case may be.

This strategy is a feint that puts public attention on the wrong things. The responsibility for causing the climate crisis lies with the oil and gas executives and government officials who, for decades, knew and covered up that fossil fuels cause global heating - and who continue to block the kinds of climate policy that can end the general use of fossil fuels. And the burden of resolving the climate crisis lies on governments. Only governmental institutions have the capacity to meet the systemic challenges of decarbonization. Even if every individual person on the planet reduced their discretionary carbon footprint to zero, the electrical, industrial and agricultural systems of our economies would continue to emit greenhouse gases and make global heating worse.

For precisely that reason, some of the clearest voices in the climate movement have devalued the concept of the climate footprint almost entirely, recommending instead that everyone should embrace and even celebrate the "climate hypocrisy" of their consumption in order to invite more people into the climate movement without any price of admission - without any need for impossible moral purity or even sacrifice. They would argue, for instance, that flying multiple times per year to give talks on the climate crisis is offset by the political effects of those talks themselves - their putative power to inspire other people to join the climate movement, pass climate policy or even reduce their own carbon footprints.

But there is not only one kind of individual in the world - not everybody is so inextricably entangled in the fossil fuel system that they have no choice but to emit too much carbon. Individuals are situated in their class; their identities are inflected by their privilege. "Driving" signifies something very different for the American worker at a big-box store who is forced to commute in her car to the mall versus the private equity manager speeding a gleaming Lamborghini around the cliffs of the Italian Riviera. One act is the expression of entanglement in an exploitative economic system that makes it impossible not to emit carbon; the other is the expression of the injustice of that very system.

The discretionary carbon footprints of the 1% are not only unjust on a symbolic level. They are also quite literally a material cause of the climate crisis. Researchers estimate that more than half of the emissions generated by humanity since our emergence on this planet have been emitted since 1990. But in these past 30 years, the emissions of the poorest 50% of people have grown hardly at all: They represented a little under 7% of global emissions in 1990, and they remain a little over 7% of global emissions today. By contrast, the richest 10% of people are responsible for 52% of cumulative global emissions - and the 1% for a full 15%.

This means that the richest 63 million are producing fully double the dangerous greenhouse gases that half of all humanity, or nearly four billion people, emit. When scientists include the embodied emissions - or what it takes to make the products bought by the rich - in the calculation of their individual carbon footprints, the numbers become even more grotesque: That makes the average carbon footprint of the richest more than 75 times higher than that of the poorest. An estimate looking into 20 of the most prominent billionaires in the U.S. and Europe found that their carbon footprints in 2018 ranged from about 1,000 metric tons to nearly 32,000.

Meanwhile, much of the Global South is already being destroyed by global heating. The latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report shows that, from 1991 to 2010, climate change lowered African countries' per capita GDP by around 13.6%. Declining rainfall due to climate change between 1960 and 2000 alone caused a GDP gap between 15-40% in affected countries, compared to the rest of the world. The climate movement must call for the end of the fossil fuel system that produces and justifies the wealth of the rich while making the Global South uninhabitable.

At the same time, the people who live in the Global South have the right to create economies that take them out of poverty, and fossil energy is, of course, currently available to fuel this development. The challenge is that the whole world's remaining carbon budget for even just a 50/50 chance of halting global heating at 1.5°C is 420 gigatons of CO2, or about 11 years at current emission rates. This means that governments in the Global North must make good on their commitments to provide aid and pay for the loss and damage already caused by the Global North's historical emissions - and banks must lend money at cost for climate-safe energy and infrastructure projects in developing countries - so that the Global South can leapfrog into a zero-emissions economy rather than locking in further fossil fuel dependency.

Yet even then, economic development will require at least some steel and cement production, which generates emissions that will also spend down our minuscule remaining carbon budget. The idea that even one metric ton of that budget should be used for yachts, private jets, new wardrobes every three months (fashion brands usually produce four "collections" a year) or even unnecessary commercial flights relies on the dehumanization of the people - generally people of color - who live in the places where the planet is unravelling first.

Dramatically unequal consumption lies at the heart of the climate crisis. In calling for justice, the climate movement must call for the wealthy to reduce their individual carbon footprints - or have their individual carbon footprints reduced by regulation - to as close to zero as possible.

Of course, many Americans are wealthy in global terms. Oxfam has defined the world's 1% as the 60 million people earning over $109,000 a year. They defined the 10% as the 770 million people earning over $38,000. Yet even those who are affluent in a global sense might not have the extra cash to replace their gas furnace with a heat pump, put solar panels on their roof or replace their car with an EV. Nor might they have the choice to buy clean power from their utilities. The U.S. government has yet to pass policy that makes private zero-carbon options available or that provides public options like community solar or suburban public transportation.

And that is exactly why you should not tell people who live paycheck to paycheck, or who are not already deeply engaged in the climate fight, that they should worry about their individual carbon footprints. Social science research and common sense show that telling these people they need to consume less makes their support for climate policy go down. That's why BP popularized the idea of the individual carbon footprint in the first place. The vast majority of Americans, even those of us who are rich by global standards, are entrapped by our current economic system and quite literally unable to make transformative changes in our lifestyles.

People who are locked in or stuck should never be made to feel ashamed, frustrated or helpless. And no one should embrace moral absolutism. Movements are built from connections, and connections are made when people approach each other with empathy, embracing their common imperfections and ambivalences, their shared complicity and entanglement. Having the courage to start thinking about the climate crisis at all is hard enough: People entering the climate movement should be welcomed into a community of care.

Yet for us to have any chance to resolve the climate crisis, the climate movement needs to call for climate justice - for new norms and policies targeting the luxury consumption of the super-rich and the upper-middle-class consumption that emulates it. As Bloomberg News recently reported, the personal emissions of the top 0.001% - those with at least $ 129.2 million in wealth - are so large that these people's individual consumption decisions "can have the same impact as nationwide policy interventions." And the super-rich are not reducing their individual carbon footprints voluntarily. On the contrary. In 2021, sales of superyachts, by far the most polluting luxury asset, surged by 77%.

But, you may ask, why shouldn't the rich enjoy the fruits of their success? Isn't it possible for us to simply innovate our way out of the climate crisis, abating the emissions of the wealthy and everyone else, by using technology to decarbonize fossil fuels or remove excess carbon from the atmosphere?

Well, carbon capture doesn't capture anything close to 100% of power-plant emissions - it still allows global heating to get worse, just at a more gradual pace. You can think of it like maintenance chemotherapy for metastatic cancer. And the innovations that will supposedly enable us to remove atmospheric carbon - such as bioenergy with carbon-capture and storage (BECCS) or direct air capture (DAC) - face hard planetary constraints that make them infeasible at multi-gigaton scales.

If we used BECCS to remove 12 gigatons of CO2 a year from the atmosphere - around a quarter of global annual emissions - we would have to grow bioenergy on a land area about one and a half times the size of India, according to the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine. This is nearly half the land area on which the whole planet grows food. Using this land to deploy BECCS could itself compound injustice by causing food prices to rise steeply and thereby producing a sharp rise in world hunger.

DAC is often touted as a relatively small-footprint carbon removal solution, but we must also take its energy requirements into account. In order to capture one million metric tons of CO2 - about 15 minutes of annual emissions - with the lower-energy version of DAC, the National Academies estimates that we would need anywhere from 1,355 to 2,450 acres of land to host the required methane gas plants and solar panels. To give you a sense of the scale: An American football field is 1.32 acres. New York's Central Park is 843 acres. This level of land use surely presents feasibility - not to mention justice - issues.

Further, the climate crisis is not simply a problem of excess carbon in the atmosphere. It's also an entirely unsustainable extraction and distribution of material resources. We would need a second Earth if everyone on the planet ate the way Americans do. As revered environmental scientist Vaclav Smil put it in the pages of this magazine, if only one billion more people started consuming at American levels, even then, "the planet would be stripped."

Resolving the climate crisis will require more than innovation. It will require remaking our systems - including our class system, or at least the unequal levels of consumption that our class system justifies. Ultimately, this transformation will be delivered by government policies in the context of international negotiations. But it requires a revolution in values, too. We'll know that we're on our way when Instagram posts about jet-setting vacations inspire disgust rather than excitement and aspiration.

To seed that revolution, you can talk about the personal carbon footprints of the super-rich and the people who emulate them. You can call for climate justice. And you can communicate your commitment to these principles by reducing your own discretionary consumption as much as you can.

Having as low a carbon footprint as possible may be all the more important when you're talking to people who may have doubts about climate change or feel ambivalence about its solutions. Social psychology has long since identified what it calls a " bystander effect" in group dynamics, whereby people will remain in a room filling with smoke, even as they talk about the possibility of fire, until someone perceived as a leader actually gets up and walks out of the room. If climate communicators talk about our burning world and the need for climate justice without at least trying to embody and perform carbon equality, they will end up sending a mixed message that reinforces people's cognitive dissonance.

Reducing your own discretionary consumption will also enable you to talk about how to have pleasure, take a break, find joy, discover new places and celebrate success without using fossil fuels. Did you decide not to fly, but take a train - which, unlike a plane, can run on clean energy? Did you enjoy the experience of having time to read or watching beautiful scenery go by? Talk about that experience. Are you really into how quickly your induction stove boils water? Talk about that, too. Do you want a world in which everyone is guaranteed six weeks of paid vacation, enough time to travel overseas in elegant solar- and wind-powered clipper ships? Yes, talk about that, too.

In one theory of change, movements build power by placing new people in the rooms where things happen - by raising the profile of climate leaders and amplifying their voices until they are invited to sit at the table of decision-making and transform the way things work. But this theory of change is itself an idea of individual action. It gives one or another person more access and influence within our current system, but it doesn't change the system itself.

To change the system is to transform its social norms and ideological assumptions as much as it is to transform its means of production and consumption. This work has historically preceded the passage of policy, which only later codifies new norms in legislation whose goals have been so "normalized," as it were, that opposition or reversal becomes fringe or even unthinkable.

We have to make it normal not just to use zero-carbon forms of energy, but also to pursue our ambitions and enjoy our pleasures without making global heating worse. The material possibility for that life will be produced only by policy, but its cultural and imaginative possibility will be created only by behavior.

The climate crisis is profoundly unfair. The wealthy are currently destroying the Global South - and, if nothing changes, eventually the whole planet - for their own profit and pleasure. Most of their voracious consumption is entirely voluntary. We need to start talking about the personal carbon footprints of the rich and, as much as we can, walking our talk in order to resolve the climate crisis in time to have a livable future.
Correction: This essay originally stated that the low-energy version of DAC would require 1,355-2,450 acres of land to capture one thousand metric tons of CO2, or one second of annual emissions. It should have said one million metric tons of CO2, or about 15 minutes of annual emissions.

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We Need To Talk About The Carbon Footprints Of The Rich | NOEMA

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What can you do, as a single individual, to help halt global heating? Social science research suggests that one of the most powerful things you can do is talk about the climate crisis in your networks. But according to many climate activists, the one thing you should not do is discuss people's personal carbon footprints.

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Essaying Self, Wilderness, and Place: a response to issues raised by George Monbiot’s Feral - by Iain Biggs

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Essaying Self, Wilderness, and Place: a response to issues raised by George Monbiot’s Feral - by Iain Biggs

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In an earlier draft of this essay I wrote that it is intended for friends and colleagues in Wales, Ireland, and Scotland working on "rural" issues. Revisiting it, I have to acknowledge that this is not entirely true. It is also written to enable me to understand why Feral made me angry, why it seemed an attack on the ecosophical principles I have shared with friends and students for many years. What was it that that lurked just beneath the rhetorical surface of Monbiot's righteous environmental indignation that smelled like the rankest possessive individualism, the conquest mentality that created the issues it claims to resolve?

The approach adopted draws on Geraldine Finn's warning against 'the traditional assumptions of high-altitude thinking, thinking forgetful of its contingent roots in particular persons, places and times', and on her argument for placing greater emphasis on the task of 'keeping alive local memory and imagination as a reservoir of meanings, truths, and possibilities for a different future'.(1996:137&141] Consequently I begin by acknowledging the convergence of circumstance and friendship that have animated this essay, an acknowledgement that also constitutes a declaration of interest.

I'm indebted to conversations with Lindsey Colbourne, the coordinator of Utopias Bach, about her tree nurturing activities, her ways of getting to know Dyffryn Peris since moving there in 2005, and about the impact of tourism in upland north Wales. Conversations that were given additional significance by a doctoral candidate who introduced me to the conflict over thefuture of the Plynlimon in the Cambrian mountains where she lives. A conflict between the Summit to Sea project, supported ideologically by Monbiot's Feral: Rewilding the Land, Sea and Human Life (2014) and in practice by his charity Rewilding Britain on one hand, and a local community that saw this as threatening its sense of place, its economic future and its Welsh-language cultural identity on the other.

An important circumstance was reading the dedication in my late parents-in-law's copy of England's Last Wilderness: A Journey Through the North Pennines (1989). This walking guide, by ecologist David Bellamy and environmental journalist Brenden Quayle is dedicated to 'Walter, Old Willie, and all the Wild Men', and was published within a year of the 1988 designation of the North Pennines as an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB). This area includes Weardale in County Durham, the home of my wife's maternal ancestors and a place that I've visited annually for some forty years. This reference helped contextualise the issues in Wales and the "Wild Men" mentality by linking them to my experience of an upland place that has much common with Plynlimon.

I'm also indebted to my friend Rowan O'Neill, who suggested me as a speaker to a group of Welsh artists and academics. A group setting out to address the issues raised for rural areas like upland communities by post-Brexit change, including interventions like the Summit to Sea initiative, and with which I've subsequently worked as a consultant. I was at that time involved in similar work taking place in both the Irish Republic and Scotland and studying with Haumea, an online initiative delivering eco-literacy education set up by the forester, educator, eco-activist and artist Cathy Fitzgerald. I'm also indebted to Ewan Allinson for help with information and for a sharing of interests and concerns.

As the above makes clear, what follows is not "objective" in the usual academic sense. Rather it is informed by, and respects, friendships and loyalties both new and old.
'It is no extravagance to formulate the problem of the future ...in terms of imagination'.
Paul Ricoeur's detailed articulation of 'political imagination' (in Kearney 1996:3), together with Richard Kearney's elaboration of its structural dynamics (1991), provide one point of reference for this essay. Felix Guattari's understanding of the interrelationship of the three ecologies of self, society and environment, another. (Genosko 2008) It is on the basis of the interaction between such ideas and my lived experience that I suggest that Feral is predicated on a flawed amalgam of ungrounded utopian vision, an outdated conception of self, an inflated projection of a personal predilection, and a reductive approach to complex psychosocial and place-based issues.

George Monbiot's almost obsessive identification with rewilding is shot through with assumptions, both explicit and tacit, about a heroic, risk-taking masculinity he sees as intolerably restricted by the demands of contemporary life. A form of life he sees as no longer able to offer him access to the 'high, wild note of exaltation' he craves. [2014:26] An experience of exaltation that is, none the less, very largely dependent on the mediating socio-economic circumstances that provide him with the financial means, leisure time and possibilities of ownership necessary to afford him such experiences as a solitary encounter with a freak wave and eye-to-eye contact with a large bull dolphin in the wild. In short, his wilderness experience is highly mediated by his location within the economics of the culture he desires to escape.

My main concern here is not, however, with the intertwining of a rewilding mentality and the American-inspired Adventure or Risk culture predicated on marketing the experiences of exaltation that preoccupy Monbiot. Rather it is with the psychosocial circumstances necessary to effect ecosophical action. I want to sketch out a basis for a political imagination on which to establish genuinely ecosophical approaches to the changes needed in order to prevent both ecological and social collapse. Nothing in what I write is intended to diminish our need torespond to the deplorable state of the UK's rural ecologies, or as an argument against the judicious and appropriate reforestation of land in places like Plynlimon and Weardale. My exposition does however require accounting for the flaws Feral exhibits. Flaws that, as I hope events in the Welsh uplands will subsequently show, are counterproductive to its author's aims and damaging to the need to realise genuinely ecosophical change more generally.
The persistence of wilderness thinking
The publication and reception of Feral indicate that, despite the considerable volume of thinking (e.g. Solnit 1994 & 2001, Cronon 1995, Schama 1995, Jamie 2008, Ray 2017) that unpacks uncritical identification with 'the sublime and the frontier', (Cronon 1995:3) or with an Edenic thinking that perpetuates Western civilization's 'oldest story' (Solnit 2001:12), such identifications persist regardless. It is important to acknowledge that they do so in no small part because encounters with wilderness, despite this being a highly particular cultural construct, remind individuals that they are inseparable from the ecological systems that sustain their lives. Experience of what is called wilderness is both a source of genuine wonder and insight and a marketable cultural product eulogised as the habitat of what Kathleen Jamie names 'the lone enraptured male'. (2008). Analysis of the socially problematic historical, cultural, gendered, and ableist aspects of the wilderness mentality has not diminished it, since it is now the basis for a heavily-marketed international Adventure or Risk industry as a sub-set of global tourism.

What follows will reject the dominant conception of both rewilding and the self to take up a specific view of place and placed-ness linked to an understanding of self-as-community; one that values 'emotional intimacy, anthropomorphic empathy, aesthetic appreciation and ritual devotion'. (Hillman 2006:335) An approach currently being explored in practice in Wales through the experiments of Utopias Bach. Grounded in a testimonial relationship to place, this is a small-scale utopianism enacted in day-to-day life via the playfully critical spirit of endeavours such as Fluxus. It offers, that is, an adventurous alternative to the inflated, ungrounded utopianism that animates Feral's case for rewilding. In what follows I have viewed Feral on the basis of Kathleen Jamie's injunction that: 'if we read about "nature" or wild places, it pays to wonder, who's telling me this, who's manipulating my responses, who's doing the mediating'? (2008:3).
A failure of eco-ethical imagination
This approach assumes that Feral is intended to have real effects in the world. For example, that its violent attack on upland sheep farming in Wales is intended to prepare the ground for large-scale blanket rewilding through projects such as Summit to Sea. Support presumably intended to counter any public concern about the psychic and socio-cultural consequences of such a project on the small and economically vulnerable upland Welsh community it would effectively displace and dismantle.

Fig. 1 'Wilding the Last Colony' Y Tir, April 2019

I won't elaborate on Monbiot's position when, in its April 2019 edition, Y Tir produced an Illustrated article pointedly entitled 'Wilding in the Last Colony'. [See Fig. 1 above]. This sets out the network of influence and funding sources behind the first iteration of the Summit to Sea project, which included Monbiot's Rewilding Britain charity. It is sufficient to say that, given the role the vilification of sheep and upland sheep farming central to his promotion of "rewilding" Monbiot, himself a highly paid investigative journalist, was unwise to join an alliance that received funding from the Ingleby Company, owners of farms in New Zealand and Australia that annually produce over sixty thousand lambs and between three and four hundred tonnes of wool.

Richard Kearney argues that imagination has 'crucial ethic powers' in addition to 'poetic powers'; ethical powers vital to our taking action and that he summarizes as: 'the utopian; the testimonial; and the empathetic'. (1993:218) He views the testimonial imagination as putting 'itself in the service of the unforgettable', as an act of witnessing, (ibid:223), arguing that if the utopian imagination fails to attend to such witnessing it: 'risks degenerating into empty fantasy' because 'it forfeits all purchase on historical experience'. (ibid:220) It is in just this respect that I suggest Monbiot's ungrounded utopianism is deeply problematic. For reasons I will discuss later, it floats free of the lived historical experience of those his proposals would most immediately effect. Such a version of rewilding implies, as the ecologist John Rodwell points out, a degree of forgetfulness of the past that could be 'considered a pathology'. (2010: 21) In terms of the political imagination as Ricoeur and Kearney understand it, Monbiot's selectively citing extensive economic and scientific "facts" in support of rewilding is, in terms of the imagination required by an effective politics, largely beside the point. As the inclusion of the word 'colony' in the title of the Y Tir article suggests, Feral's failure of imagination lies in failing to take account of the deeply felt consequences of the historical experience of those communities it would most directly affect.
How not to initiate ecosophical change
Feral opens by establishing Monbiot's self-proclaimed status as a "wild man" happy to eat live grubs on the basis of memories of former adventures in the South American jungle. It goes on to tell the reader of his admiration for a man 'who had abandoned comfort and certainty for a life of violent insecurity' and who, despite his slim chance of 'coming out alive, solvent and healthy' from the dire situation in which he had placed himself may, in Monbiot's eyes, have made the right choice. (2014:2) In short, it begins by signalling the author's preoccupation with risk and the 'high, wild note of exaltation' obtained in the wild; (ibid) the same preoccupations serviced by a growing Adventure Culture predicated on selling "wilderness". (Ray in Ray & Sibara 2017:29) We are also told that, having moved to rural Wales, Monbiot felt diminished by the 'smallness' of a lacking the uncertainty, fear, courage, and aggression that he believes 'evolved to see us through our quests and crises'. (2014:6) (A view at odds with a growing scientific view of evolutionary development that stresses the importance of social bonding and cooperative). Consequently, a reader might be forgiven for thinking that statements like: 'Rewilding, to me, is about resisting the urge to control nature and allowing it to find its own way' (ibid.:9) are primarily an expression of the author's own internal conflicts.

For this reader the most disconcerting aspect of Feral is not the implication of the arguably questionable use of scientific "evidence" to support its case. (Scientific data always being dependent on framing and interpretation for its social meaning). Rather it is everything Monbiot fails to address. Feral was published eight years after Kathleen Jamie's A Lone Enraptured Male, a review of Robert Macfarlane's The Wild Places, which illuminates the problematic assumptions that run through popular attitudes to "wild" nature. Monbiot's blithe disregard of the issues Jamie raises is reflected in his failure to acknowledge the influence of class, gender, nationality, and the legacies of colonialism in his notion of wilderness. Furthermore, Feral fails in the terms H. L. Mencken uses to define good journalism, namely that: 'It should "afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted"'. It is hard to avoid seeing Feral as written specifically to confirm the prejudices and ignorance of a particular, comfortably-off, "environmentally conscious" urban readership that regards places like the Welsh uplands as little more than holiday destinations. Its argument is made at the expense of remote upland rural communities it claims survive only because supported by its readers' taxes. This, and it's vilification of sheep and those whose identity and precarious economic survival depends on them, is an apt measure of Monbiot's balancing of "comfort and affliction".

The significant absences in the grandiosely titled Feral: Rewilding the Land, Sea and Human Life are legion. Given that title, it would not be unreasonable to expect Feral to offer less autobiography and more careful contextualisation. It might be expected to include, in no particular order, most or all of the following points. Consideration of the relative merits of blanket reforesting versus the judicious restoration of bog in upland Wales, given both that the latter is three times more effective in terms of carbon capture than the former and the location of the watersheds of the Severn and Wye rivers. Consideration of issues related to forest farming with regard to the diversification of habitat and the need for a sustainable human economy, both seen in the context of the inevitability of increasing food security issues. A detailed discussion of private and corporate land ownership and of access to existing woodland. A balanced assessment of social benefit between investment in urban greening measures and large-scale rewilding. Of particular importance given that urban greening enhances the quality of life of the large element of the population financially debarred from Adventure tourism and in countering pollution through such strategies as planting green screens around schools. Critical consideration of Government subsidy to the privately-owned grouse shooting industry over a period when the Environment Agency, which serves the public good, has suffered substantive funding cuts. Consideration of the distortion of environmental debate by a media industry geared to an audience without lived experience of the rural working communities it is increasingly encouraged to denigrate, and of the political and economic interests that denigration serves. Particular consideration of the ways in which "rewilding" is entangled in global networks of economic investment in tourism and lucrative Adventure-related industries. Most importantly, however, consideration of the relationship of such specific issues and socio-environmental concerns to long-term infrastructural, energy and social well-being issues.

Feral merely nods to, skirts over, or ignores such issues. Instead we are given the chapter 'The Beast Within (Or How Not to Rewild)' that tries to distance Monbiot's proposals from those of politically authoritarian regimes by insisting that rewilding must not be imposed by Governments. There is no analysis, however, of large-scale rewilding currently being conducted by business interests and wealthy individuals, or of how public rejection of Government intervention would favour such individuals and businesses. All this despite our being told that rewilding should not aim to produce 'a paradise for the rich' extracted 'from the lands of the poor'. (2014:208) Monbiot takes care to reference Simon Schama's exoneration of modern environmentalism from any kind of historical kinship with totalitarianism. This is particularly disingenuous, since it is used to support Monbiot's claim that 'large-scale restoration of ... natural processes can take place without harming anyone's interests'. (ibid.) Perhaps it can. However Monbiot chooses to ignore the racist, elitist and ableist attitudes that informed rewilding in North America and continue to constitute the less savoury aspects of the 'corporeal unconscious' of the contemporary Adventure and Risk industries. (Ray 2017). The second half of Rebecca Solnit's Savage Dreams: a Journey into the Hidden Wars of the American West, focused on Yosemite National Park, demonstrates just how far from the truth Monbiot's claim about the harmlessness of rewilding is. To read Feral in the light of Solnit's exposition is to be made aware of a number of uncomfortable parallels between the treatment of Native Americans in the USA and the more insidious, but ultimately no less coercive, forces that Monbiot argues should be applied to Welsh-speaking upland farming communities.

What follows here is an essay in the sense Ruth Behar gives the term, namely: 'an act of personal witnessing'. (1996:20).

See https://lindseycolbourne.com/fy-milltir-sgwr-my-own-projects-and-interventions

See Hillman J 2006: 335 for the reasoning behind this assertion.

See, for a recent example of this in magpies:
https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-attached-tracking-devices-to-magpies-that-s-when-things-got-weird?fbclid=IwAR3KPFTlmTzRiy__5HtKAQK0mKeyWZgLo3ZwRQKyh_76xhJk008ocR1Igxk

Quoted by Will Self, see https://www.vice.com/en/article/kwpvax/will-self-charlie-hebdo-attack-the-west-satire-france-terror-105

See, for example, Fowler 2020, Hayes 2020.

Forces independently discussed in some detail by Monbiot's critic, Dafydd Morris-Jones, see https://play.acast.com/s/bbccountryfilemagazine/rewildingwiththreatenwelshculture-saysfarmerdafyddmorrisjones

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Essaying Self, Wilderness, and Place: a response to issues raised by George Monbiot's Feral. (Part One)

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In an earlier draft of this essay I wrote that it is intended for friends and colleagues in Wales, Ireland, and Scotland working on "rural" issues. Revisiting it, I have to acknowledge that this is not entirely true.

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https://youtu.be/nAke2iQ53jc

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Weaving diagram  for August Collaboratory

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Weaving diagram  for August Collaboratory

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Quotes and links to two papers by Wanda Zyborska

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This is a really thought provoking piece about the dangers of 'targeting' or 'centering' particular groups, and the importance of collaboration with, deference to, believing in actual experience and knowledge rather than assuming these things go with particular 'characteristics' people may have

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Original Article:

Being-in-the-Room Privilege:

Elite Capture and Epistemic Deference

Olúfémi O. Táíwò

"I abandoned the pitch because I don't think I'm the right person to write this story - I have no idea what it's like to be Black... I can send you the Google doc with my notes, too?"

I flinched inwardly. It was an innocent and properly motivated offer: Helen, a freelance journalist, was offering to give up something for me, stemming from her concern to live out an ethos of racial justice. But I worried that it was also a trap.

Even setting aside the mistake about the power dynamics of the conversation (I am Black, but also a tenure-track professor), there was a problem here that I had seen many times before. Behind the assumption that I had experiential insight she lacked was the recognizable cultural imprint of a much discussed, polarizing perspective on knowledge and politics: standpoint epistemology.

If you consider a textbook definition of standpoint epistemology, it may be hard to see the controversy around this idea. The International Encyclopedia of Philosophy boils it down to three innocuous-sounding contentions:

1) Knowledge is socially situated

2) Marginalized people have some positional advantages in gaining some forms of knowledge

3) Research programs ought to reflect these facts.

Liam Kofi Bright argues persuasively that these contentions are derivable from a combination of 1) basic empiricist commitments, and 2) a minimally plausible account of how the social world affects what knowledge groups of people are likely to seek and find.

So, if the problem isn't the basic idea, what is it?

I think it's less about the core ideas and more about the prevailing norms that convert them into practice. The call to "listen to the most affected" or "centre the most marginalized" is ubiquitous in many academic and activist circles. But it's never sat well with me. In my experience, when people say they need to "listen to the most affected", it isn't because they intend to set up Skype calls to refugee camps or to collaborate with houseless people. Instead, it has more often meant handing conversational authority and attentional goods to those who most snugly fit into the social categories associated with these ills - regardless of what they actually do or do not know, or what they have or have not personally experienced. In the case of my conversation with Helen, my racial category tied me more "authentically" to an experience that neither of us had had. She was called to defer to me by the rules of the game as we understood it. Even where stakes are high - where potential researchers are discussing how to understand a social phenomenon, where activists are deciding what to target - these rules often prevail.

The trap wasn't that standpoint epistemology was affecting the conversation, but how. Broadly, the norms of putting standpoint epistemology into practice call for practices of deference: giving offerings, passing the mic, believing. These are good ideas in many cases, and the norms that ask us to be ready to do them stem from admirable motivations: a desire to increase the social power of marginalized people identified as sources of knowledge and rightful targets of deferential behaviour. But deferring in this way as a rule or default political orientation can actually work counter to marginalized groups' interests, especially in elite spaces.

Some rooms have outsize power and influence: the Situation Room, the newsroom, the bargaining table, the conference room. Being in these rooms means being in a position to affect institutions and broader social dynamics by way of deciding what one is to say and do. Access to these rooms is itself a kind of social advantage, and one often gained through some prior social advantage. From a societal standpoint, the "most affected" by the social injustices we associate with politically important identities like gender, class, race, and nationality are disproportionately likely to be incarcerated, underemployed, or part of the 44 percent of the world's population without internet access - and thus both left out of the rooms of power and largely ignored by the people in the rooms of power. Individuals who make it past the various social selection pressures that filter out those social identities associated with these negative outcomes are most likely to be in the room. That is, they are most likely to be in the room precisely because of ways in which they are systematically different from (and thus potentially unrepresentative of) the very people they are then asked to represent in the room.

I suspected that Helen's offer was a trap. She was not the one who set it, but it threatened to ensnare us both all the same. Broader cultural norms - the sort set in motion by prefacing statements with "As a Black man..." - cued up a set of standpoint-respecting practices that many of us know consciously or unconsciously by rote. However, the forms of deference that often follow are ultimately self-undermining and only reliably serve "elite capture": the control over political agendas and resources by a group's most advantaged people. If we want to use standpoint epistemology to challenge unjust power arrangements, it's hard to imagine how we could do worse.

***

To say what's wrong with the popular, deferential applications of standpoint epistemology, we need to understand what makes it popular. A number of cynical answers present themselves: some (especially the more socially advantaged) don't genuinely want social change - they just want the appearance of it. Alternatively, deference to figures from oppressed communities is a performance that sanitizes, apologizes for, or simply distracts from the fact that the deferrer has enough "in the room" privilege for their "lifting up" of a perspective to be of consequence.

I suspect there is some truth to these views, but I am unsatisfied. Many of the people who support and enact these deferential norms are rather like Helen: motivated by the right reasons, but trusting people they share such rooms with to help them find the proper practical expression of their joint moral commitments. We don't need to attribute bad faith to all or even most of those who interpret standpoint epistemology deferentially to explain the phenomenon, and it's not even clear it would help. Bad "roommates" aren't the problem for the same reason that Helen being a good roommate wasn't the solution: the problem emerges from how the rooms themselves are constructed and managed.

To return to the initial example with Helen, the issue wasn't merely that I hadn't grown up in the kind of low-income, redlined community she was imagining. The epistemic situation was much worse than this. Many of the facts about me that made my life chances different from those of the people she was imagining were the very same facts that made me likely to be offered things on their behalf. If I had grown up in such a community, we probably wouldn't have been on the phone together.

***

Many aspects of our social system serve as filtering mechanisms, determining which interactions happen and between whom, and thus which social patterns people are in a position to observe. For the majority of the 20th century, the U.S. quota system of immigration made legal immigration with a path to citizenship almost exclusively available to Europeans (earning Hitler's regard as the obvious "leader in developing explicitly racist policies of nationality and immigration"). But the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act opened up immigration possibilities, with a preference for "skilled labour".

My parents' qualification as skilled labourers does much to explain their entry into the country and the subsequent class advantages and monetary resources (such as wealth) that I was born into. We are not atypical: the Nigerian-American population is one of the country's most successful immigrant populations (what no one mentions, of course, is that the 112,000 or so Nigerian-Americans with advanced degrees is utterly dwarfed by the 82 million Nigerians who live on less than a dollar a day, or how the former fact intersects with the latter). The selectivity of immigration law helps explain the rates of educational attainment of the Nigerian diasporic community that raised me, which in turn helps explain my entry into the exclusive Advanced Placement and Honours classes in high school, which in turn helps explain my access to higher education...and so on, and so on.

​

It is easy, then, to see how this deferential form of standpoint epistemology contributes to elite capture at scale. The rooms of power and influence are at the end of causal chains that have selection effects. As you get higher and higher forms of education, social experiences narrow - some students are pipelined to PhDs and others to prisons. Deferential ways of dealing with identity can inherit the distortions caused by these selection processes.

​

​But it's equally easy to see locally - in this room, in this academic literature or field, in this conversation - why this deference seems to make sense. It is often an improvement on the epistemic procedure that preceded it: the person deferred to may well be better epistemically positioned than the others in the room. It may well be the best we can do while holding fixed most of the facts about the rooms themselves: what power resides in them, who is admitted.

© Melody Overstreet

But these are the last facts we should want to hold fixed. Doing better than the epistemic norms we've inherited from a history of explicit global apartheid is an awfully low bar to set. The facts that explain who ends up in which room shape our world much more powerfully than the squabbles for comparative prestige between people who have already made it into the rooms. And when the conversation is about social justice, the mechanisms of the social system that determine who gets into which room often just are the parts of society we aim to address. For example, the fact that incarcerated people cannot participate in academic discussions about freedom that physically take place on campus is intimately related to the fact that they are locked in cages.

Deference epistemology marks itself as a solution to an epistemic and political problem. But not only does it fail to solve these problems, it adds new ones. One might think questions of justice ought to be primarily concerned with fixing disparities around health care, working conditions, and basic material and interpersonal security. Yet conversations about justice have come to be shaped by people who have ever more specific practical advice about fixing the distribution of attention and conversational power. Deference practices that serve attention-focused campaigns (e.g. we've read too many white men, let's now read some people of colour) can fail on their own highly questionable terms: attention to spokespeople from marginalized groups could, for example, direct attention away from the need to change the social system that marginalizes them.

Elites from marginalized groups can benefit from this arrangement in ways that are compatible with social progress. But treating group elites' interests as necessarily or even presumptively aligned with full group interests involves a political naiveté we cannot afford. Such treatment of elite interests functions as a racial Reaganomics: a strategy reliant on fantasies about the exchange rate between the attention economy and the material economy.

Perhaps the lucky few who get jobs finding the most culturally authentic and cosmetically radical description of the continuing carnage are really winning one for the culture. Then, after we in the chattering class get the clout we deserve and secure the bag, its contents will eventually trickle down to the workers who clean up after our conferences, to slums of the Global South's megacities, to its countryside.

But probably not.

***

A fuller and fairer assessment of what is going on with deference and standpoint epistemology would go beyond technical argument, and contend with the emotional appeals of this strategy of deference. Those in powerful rooms may be "elites" relative to the larger group they represent, but this guarantees nothing about how they are treated in the rooms they are in. After all, a person privileged in an absolute sense (a person belonging to, say, the half of the world that has secure access to "basic needs") may nevertheless feel themselves to be consistently on the low end of the power dynamics they actually experience. Deference epistemology responds to real, morally weighty experiences of being put down, ignored, sidelined, or silenced. It thus has an important non-epistemic appeal to members of stigmatized or marginalized groups: it intervenes directly in morally consequential practices of giving attention and respect.

The social dynamics we experience have an outsize role in developing and refining our political subjectivity, and our sense of ourselves. But this very strength of standpoint epistemology - its recognition of the importance of perspective - becomes its weakness when combined with deferential practical norms. Emphasis on the ways we are marginalized often matches the world as we have experienced it. But, from a structural perspective, the rooms we never needed to enter (and the explanations of why we can avoid these rooms) might have more to teach us about the world and our place in it. If so, the deferential approach to standpoint epistemology actually prevents "centring" or even hearing from the most marginalized; it focuses us on the interaction of the rooms we occupy, rather than calling us to account for the interactions we don't experience. This fact about who is in the room, combined with the fact that speaking for others generates its own set of important problems (particularly when they are not there to advocate for themselves), eliminates pressures that might otherwise trouble the centrality of our own suffering - and of the suffering of the marginalized people that do happen to make it into rooms with us.

The dangers with this feature of deference politics are grave, as are the risks for those outside of the most powerful rooms. For those who are deferred to, it can supercharge group-undermining norms. In Conflict is Not Abuse, Sarah Schulman makes a provocative observation about the psychological effects of both trauma and felt superiority: while these often come about for different reasons and have very different moral statuses, they result in similar behavioural patterns. Chief among these are misrepresenting the stakes of conflict (often by overstating harm) or representing others' independence as a hostile threat (such as failures to "centre" the right topics or people). These behaviours, whatever their causal history, have corrosive effects on individuals who perform them as well as the groups around them, especially when a community's norms magnify or multiply these behaviours rather than constraining or metabolizing them.

For those who defer, the habit can supercharge moral cowardice. The norms provide social cover for the abdication of responsibility: it displaces onto individual heroes, a hero class, or a mythicized past the work that is ours to do now in the present. Their perspective may be clearer on this or that specific matter, but their overall point of view isn't any less particular or constrained by history than ours. More importantly, deference places the accountability that is all of ours to bear onto select people - and, more often than not, a hyper-sanitized and thoroughly fictional caricature of them.

The same tactics of deference that insulate us from criticism also insulate us from connection and transformation. They prevent us from engaging empathetically and authentically with the struggles of other people - prerequisites of coalitional politics. As identities become more and more fine-grained and disagreements sharper, we come to realize that "coalitional politics" (understood as struggle across difference) is, simply, politics. Thus, the deferential orientation, like that fragmentation of political collectivity it enables, is ultimately anti-political.

Deference rather than interdependence may soothe short-term psychological wounds. But it does so at a steep cost: it can undermine the epistemic goals that motivate the project, and it entrenches a politics unbefitting of anyone fighting for freedom rather than for privilege, for collective liberation rather than mere parochial advantage.

***

© Melody Overstreet

How would a constructive approach to putting standpoint epistemology into practice differ from a deferential approach? A constructive approach would focus on the pursuit of specific goals or end results rather than avoiding "complicity" in injustice or adhering to moral principles. It would be concerned primarily with building institutions and cultivating practices of information-gathering rather than helping. It would focus on accountability rather than conformity. It would calibrate itself directly to the task of redistributing social resources and power rather than to intermediary goals cashed out in terms of pedestals or symbolism. It would focus on building and rebuilding rooms, not regulating traffic within and between them - it would be a world-making project: aimed at building and rebuilding actual structures of social connection and movement, rather than mere critique of the ones we already have.

​

The water crisis in Flint, Michigan presents a clear example of both the possibilities and limitations of refining our epistemic politics in this way. Michigan's Department of Environmental Quality (MDEQ), a government body tasked with the support of "healthy communities", with a team of fifty trained scientists at its disposal, was complicit in covering up the scale and gravity of the public health crisis from the beginning of the crisis in 2014 until it garnered national attention in 2015.

The MDEQ, speaking from a position of epistemic and political authority, defended the status quo in Flint. They claimed that "Flint water is safe to drink", and were cited in Flint Mayor Dayne Walling's statement aiming to "dispel myths and promote the truth about the Flint River" during the April 2014 transition to the Flint River water source. That transition was spearheaded under the tenure of the city's emergency manager Darnell Earley (an African-American, like many of the city residents he helped to poison). After the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) circulated a leaked internal memo from the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in July of 2014 expressing concern about lead in Flint water, the MDEQ produced a doctored report that put the overall measure of lead levels within federally mandated levels by mysteriously failing to count two contaminated samples.

The reaction from residents was immediate. The month after the switch in water source, residents reported that their tap water was discoloured and gave off an alarming odour. They didn't need their oppression to be "celebrated", "centred", or narrated in the newest academic parlance. They didn't need someone to understand what it felt like to be poisoned. What they needed was the lead out of their water. So they got to work.

The first step was to develop epistemic authority. To achieve this they built a new room: one that put Flint residents and activists in active collaboration with scientists who had the laboratories that could run the relevant tests and prove the MDEQ's report to be fraudulent. Flint residents' outcry recruited scientists to their cause and led a "citizen science" campaign, further raising the alarm about the water quality and distributing sample kits to neighbours to submit for testing. In this stage, the alliance of residents and scientists won, and the poisoning of the children of Flint emerged as a national scandal.

But this was not enough. The second step - cleaning the water - required more than state acknowledgement: it required apportioning labour and resources to fix the water and address the continuing health concerns. What Flint residents received, initially, was a mix of platitudes and mockery from the ruling elite (some of this personally committed by a President that shared a racial identity with many of them). This year, however, it looks as though the tireless activism of Flint residents and their expanding list of teammates has won additional and more meaningful victories: the ongoing campaign is pushing the replacements of the problematic service lines to their final stage and is forcing the state of Michigan to agree to a settlement of $600 million for affected families.

This outcome is in no way a wholesale victory: not only will attorney fees cut a substantial portion of payouts, but the settlement cannot undo the damage that was caused to the residents. A constructive epistemology cannot guarantee full victory over an oppressive system by itself. No epistemic orientation can by itself undo the various power asymmetries between the people and the imperial state system. But it can help make the game a little more competitive - and deference epistemology isn't even playing.

The biggest threats to social justice attention and informational economies are not the absence of yet more jargon to describe, ever more precisely or incisively, the epistemic, attentional, or interpersonal afflictions of the disempowered. The biggest threats are the erosion of the practical and material bases for popular power over knowledge production and distribution, particularly that which could aid effective political action and constrain or eliminate predation by elites. The capture and corruption of these bases by well-positioned elites, especially tech corporations, goes on unabated and largely unchallenged, including: the corporate monopolization of local news, the ongoing destruction and looting of the journalistic profession, the interference of corporations and governments in key democratic processes, and the domination of elite interests in the production of knowledge by research universities and the circulation of the output of these distorted processes by established media organizations.

Confronting these threats requires leaving some rooms - and building new ones.

***

The constructive approach to standpoint epistemology is demanding. It asks that we swim upstream: to be accountable and responsive to people who aren't yet in the room, to build the kinds of rooms we could sit in together, rather than merely judiciously navigating the rooms history has built for us. But this weighty demand is par for the course when it comes to the politics of knowledge: the American philosopher Sandra Harding famously pointed out that standpoint epistemology, properly understood, demands more rigour from science and knowledge production processes generally, not less.

But one important topic stands unaddressed. The deferential approach to standpoint epistemology often comes packaged with concern and attention to the importance of lived experience. Among these, traumatic experiences are especially foregrounded.

At this juncture, scholarly analysis and argument fail me. The remainder of what I have to say skews more towards conviction than contention. But the life of books has taught me that conviction has just as much to teach, however differently posed or processed, and so I press on.

© Melody Overstreet

I take concerns about trauma especially seriously. I grew up in the United States, a nation structured by settler colonialism, racial slavery, and their aftermath, with enough collective and historical trauma to go round. I also grew up in a Nigerian diasporic community, populated by many who had genocide in living memory. At the national and community level, I have seen a lot of traits of norms, personality, quirks of habit and action that I've suspected were downstream of these facts. At the level of individual experience, I've watched and felt myself change in reaction to fearing for my dignity or life, to crushing pain and humiliation. I reflect on these traumatic moments often, and very seldom think: "That was educational".

These experiences can be, if we are very fortunate, building blocks. What comes of them depends on how the blocks are put together: what standpoint epistemologists call the "achievement thesis". Briana Toole clarifies that, by itself, one's social location only puts a person in a position to know. "Epistemic privilege" or advantage is achieved only through deliberate, concerted struggle from that position.

I concede outright that this is certainly one possible result of the experience of oppression: have no doubt that humiliation, deprivation, and suffering can build (especially in the context of the deliberate, structured effort of "consciousness raising", as Toole specifically highlights). But these same experiences can also destroy, and if I had to bet on which effect would win most often, it would be the latter. As Agnes Callard rightly notes, trauma (and even the righteous, well-deserved anger that often accompanies it) can corrupt as readily as it can ennoble. Perhaps more so.

Contra the old expression, pain - whether borne of oppression or not - is a poor teacher. Suffering is partial, short-sighted, and self-absorbed. We shouldn't have a politics that expects different: oppression is not a prep school.

When it comes down to it, the thing I believe most deeply about deference epistemology is that it asks something of trauma that it cannot give. Demanding as the constructive approach may be, the deferential approach is far more demanding and in a far more unfair way: it asks the traumatized to shoulder burdens alone that we ought to share collectively. When I think about my trauma, I don't think about grand lessons. I think about the quiet nobility of survival. The very fact that those chapters weren't the final ones of my story is powerful enough writing all on its own. It is enough to ask of those experiences that I am still here to remember them.

© Melody Overstreet

Deference epistemology asks us to be less than we are - and not even for our own benefit. As Nick Estes explains in the context of Indigenous politics: "The cunning of trauma politics is that it turns actual people and struggles, whether racial or Indigenous citizenship and belonging, into matters of injury. It defines an entire people mostly on their trauma and not by their aspirations or sheer humanity". This performance is not for the benefit of Indigenous people, but "for white audiences or institutions of power".

I also think about James Baldwin's realization that the things that tormented him the most were "the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive". That I have survived abuse of various kinds, have faced near-death from both accidental circumstance and violence (different as the particulars of these may be from those around me) is not a card to play in gamified social interaction or a weapon to wield in battles over prestige. It is not what gives me a special right to speak, to evaluate, or to decide for a group. It is a concrete, experiential manifestation of the vulnerability that connects me to most of the people on this Earth. It comes between me and other people not as a wall, but as a bridge.

After a long discussion, I answered Helen's offer with a proposal: why don't we write something together?

​

Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò is an assistant professor of philosophy at Georgetown University. His theoretical work draws liberally from the Black radical tradition, anti-colonial thought, German transcendental philosophy, contemporary philosophy of language, contemporary social science, and histories of activism and activist thinkers. He is currently writing a book entitled Reconsidering Reparations that offers a novel philosophical argument for reparations and explores links with environmental justice. He also engages in public philosophy, including articles exploring intersections of climate justice and colonialism.

​

www.olufemiotaiwo.com

twitter.com/OlufemiOTaiwo

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Elite Capture and Epistemic Deference - Olufemi O. Taiwo

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Original Article: Being-in-the-Room Privilege: Elite Capture and Epistemic Deference Olúfémi O. Táíwò "I abandoned the pitch because I don't think I'm the right person to write this story - I have no idea what it's like to be Black... I can send you the Google doc with my notes, too?"

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Collaboratory collective mini meeting minutes 26.6.21

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Collaboratory collective mini meeting minutes 26.6.21

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Gan Catrin

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How we will run Utopias Bach Collab-atory meetings

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How we will run Utopias Bach Collab-atory meetings

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We (with thanks to Samina for raising this) make sure we review how the meetings are going - at the start, middle and end of each meeting, and we will be sharing the facilitation of the meetings. Here’s a rough outline of structure for our zoom meetings:

- start with clear purpose

- build learning about the process of the meetings into the meeting - e.g. at the start, ask what we need to remember from last meeting; in the middle review how it’s going (e.g. in smaller groups); at the end review how it has been

- introduce some suggestions for how to take part effectively (e.g. notice how much talking you are doing; build in space to think; take time out; think where your contribution is coming from - an observation, information, serious point etc)

- if/how to take notes

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Perhaps inspiration for our Metamorffosis activities?

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scrapyards of utopia bach or scrapyard as utopia bach

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An opportunity to make something for the Metamorffosis Festival in Bangor/Porthaethwy 21 - 27 June 2021

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Utopias Bach guided visualisation workshop

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Utopias Bach guided visualisation workshop

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At the Metamorffosis Festival 21 - 27 June 2021

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Play as a form of exploration and expression -    small is beautiful.

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Play as a form of exploration and expression -    small is beautiful.

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This is just something I came across and I loved the idea of using small objects ( and a limited selection possibly ) to create mini worlds to explore feelings, emotions and hopes for the future.

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LEGO Serious Play is a way of using LEGO bricks to express feelings and ideas. It is used by adults (mostly), to collaborate and discuss relationships and concepts. The building is done in metaphors - which might sound odd at first, but our research shows that almost anyone can pick it up. The process offers a unique and powerful way for people to exchange ideas.

I have a long-standing interest in the idea that, if you give people the opportunity to be creative and make things, they can often communicate more fully and more thoughtfully than they might do just through talking. For this reason I worked with the LEGO Group on LEGO Serious Play from 2005, and ended up co-writing the 'open source' release of LEGO Serious Play, launched in 2010. I've used it for a few things over the years. My book Creative Explorations (2007) explains its use as a social-science research method. I'm interested in it as a 'tool for thinking' (see, for instance, this blog post). And recently I developed a workshop for PhD students which supports participants to both share feelings and develop ideas about the PhD process.

One of the key clever things about LEGO Serious Play is that through externalising feelings and knowledge - by building them in LEGO - then everyone in a group gets a voice, because everybody builds and everybody talks about what they have built; and then also you get the opportunity - because you can literally see it, touch it and change it - to review everyone's perceptions, and collaborate to make them fit together in a coherent and meaningful way.

The official version of the LEGO Serious Play process is brilliant, but it's heavy. Literally so. The LEGO Serious Play 'Identity and Landscape Kit' (LEGO set 2000430), which is the best of the LEGO Serious Play boxes, contains 2,631 pieces, and retails for £509. Here are its contents:

To take a couple of these boxes anywhere you need strong arms, and a car. The official process also has rather complex manuals, and scripts, and training. Don't get me wrong - these are basically excellent products, produced with great care and intelligence. But you would never call them small, lightweight, portable, easy, or quick.

For several years - on and off - I've been fascinated by the question of how small you can make a meaningful LEGO Serious Play experience. I want LEGO Serious Play in my pocket, basically. Easy to carry, simple to do, but still powerful.

For quite a long time I've known that you can do a pretty good LEGO Serious Play experience using just the LEGO Serious Play 'Window Exploration Bag', which you have to buy in boxes of 100 bags (LEGO set 2000409, currently £315). Those bags were intended just for very basic introductory exercises, but actually you can do a lot with them. Each bag contains 49 pieces, and is good value for £3.15 each, except that you have to buy 100 of them.

Now. In this blog post I'm looking at whether you can do LEGO Serious Play using one of the cheapest possible retail sets that you can get from any toy shop. Specifically, today we will be using set 41046, Brown Bear's River, which is one of the LEGO Friends animals sets and sells for £2.99.

It is, I think, a really nice set. My two-year old daughter loved it. But can we do LEGO Serious Play with it? Here it is - the packaging and the set itself:

Those are official marketing photos, but the rest of the photos in this post were taken by me on our kitchen table.

So, here are the parts - 37 pieces. The little bear is very nice, and you get a fish too. There are some actual bricks, and two of several pieces, which is good - you often want a second one of something.

It's quite a good selection of 37 pieces. There's some sort of nature kind of things, and some harder, more urban kinds of things. In other words, there's some green and blue stuff, and flowers, and also there's some grey stuff. Anyway it's just 37 pieces. Can you make much, can you communicate much, with just 37 pieces?

I gave it a go.

In the following examples I imagined that I was a person - or a series of several people! - trying to communicate something about some issues in my life.

This is the first thing I built.

LEGO Serious Play models are meaningless without the stories that go with them, so I'll have to tell some stories. So, this model was built by Kevin, a 21 year old student coming towards the end of his degree course. Here he is represented by the bear, making his way gingerly along a bridge he doesn't entirely trust. The flowers and the fish represent things he's trying to get to - in particular the fish is a desireable job, but it's in the fast-flowing stream and he doesn't feel he can get to it. Some people have tossed him some leaves - other bits of work or suggestions for projects - but he doesn't want them and can't catch them anyway. So he's feeling precarious and uncertain.

This model is by Amira, a 34-year old computer scientist. Her model represents a kind of yearning journey towards a nurturing relationship, represented by the flowering tree, but this is far away from her - the bear - right now. Various obstacles stand in her way, including, she feels, financial problems (the cash register) and difficult previous relationships (represented by other bits). By shifting around the elements we might try to work out how she might feel able to move towards her goal.

This model was by George, a 67-year old retired man who feels he still has more to do in life. He is pleased with his achievements, represented by the pretty plants and flowers at the base, he still wants to travel more (represented by the sky-blue triangles further up) and wants to write a book, which he has always dreamed of, represented by the high peak at the top of this tower. The levels of the tower represent different steps and challenges on this journey.

In this more diagrammatic model, 41-year old Miriam has shown herself to be at the centre of, and somewhat torn between, a set of different obligations and aspirations. There is a tension between the countryside and having to live in the city, and between a need to make a living and wanting to do what she really enjoys. The need to attend to an elderly relative is another pull upon her time and energies.

This model by 37-year old Winston reflects a feeling of isolation, a need to jump across a gap from a current disappointing life into a new and hopefully more promising one. The jump is quite hard and he is not wholly decided. The tasty fish in the river may also turn out to be a shark that bites him.

Having considered his options and possibilities, Winston reconfigures the model to include aspects of his current life shifted onto and combined with the life he was hoping for. By externalising the decision he was able to see that it didn't have to be such a disruptive break with the past - he could actually combine these worlds. The possible-shark fish still circles around, but Winston feels that he has constructed a happier and more stable base now.

OK so that's the last of the models. Those stories about people were made up by me just to illustrate the kind of thing that people might want to, or be able to, communicate with the 37 pieces of Brown Bear's River.

This is what I think we can conclude:

→ You can make a range of different things with the 37 pieces. You can show a model of a journey, or a sort of diagram of relationships, or highlight particular challenges or decisions.

→ You can convey personal and serious thoughts, feelings, issues and dilemmas.

→ The models that were built do, inevitably, have similarities - there tends to be a bear (!) and some other stuff, nature, fish and flowers - there's no getting away from them really - but crucially, the meanings attached to the pieces are different, and so very different things can be communicated.

Overall I think it went quite well, and was an interesting step in my ongoing, long-term, Micro LEGO Serious Play project.

Finally, a note for if you are now attracted to LEGO set 41046, Brown Bear's River: LEGO sets don't have a very long shelf-life; instead the company regularly makes new things which replace the older things. So the Brown Bear may only be around until September/October 2014. The good news is, there are always rather a lot of other good LEGO sets just around the corner.

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Micro LEGO Serious Play: How small can a useful tool for thinking be?

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LEGO Serious Play is a way of using LEGO bricks to express feelings and ideas. It is used by adults (mostly), to collaborate and discuss relationships and concepts. The building is done in metaphors - which might sound odd at first, but our research shows that almost anyone can pick it up.

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A talk by Paul Francis about Shamanism, which seemed relevant in the context of discussions of magic and radical imagination.

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An Introduction to Therapeutic Shamanism

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An  introduction to shamanism, animism, soul-loss and soul-retrieval. By Paul Francis, author of the Therapeutic Shamanism series of books, and founder of the Three Ravens College.

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Three types of documentation we are using

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Three types of documentation we are using

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Documentation is an art in itself!

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The highly anticipated new work from journalist and Bafta award-winning filmmaker, Adam Curtis will premiere exclusively on BBC iPlayer on 11 February 2021.

This new series of films tells the story of how we got to the strange days we are now experiencing. And why both those in power - and we - find it so difficult to move on.

The films trace different forces across the world that have led to now, not just in the West, but in China and Russia as well. It covers a wide range - including the strange roots of modern conspiracy theories, the history of China, opium and opiods, the history of Artificial Intelligence, melancholy over the loss of empire and, love and power. And explores whether modern culture, despite its radicalism, is really just part of the new system of power.

Adam Curtis says: "These strange days did not just happen. We - and those in power - created them together."

Can't Get You Out Of My Head: An Emotional History of the Modern World is a BBC Film and BBC Three production for BBC iPlayer. Produced by Sandra Gorel, Executive Producer is Rose Garnett for BBC Film.
EH
Full synopsis

We are living through strange days.

Across Britain, Europe and America societies have become split and polarised not just in politics but across the whole culture. There is anger at the inequality and the ever growing corruption - and a widespread distrust of the elites.

And into this has come the pandemic that has brutally dramatised those divisions.

But despite the chaos there is a paralysis - a sense that no one knows how to escape from this.

This new series of films by Adam Curtis tell the story of how we got to this place. And why both those in power - and we - find it so difficult to move on.

The films trace different forces across the world that have led to now, not just in the West, but in China and Russia as well.

It covers a wide range - including the strange roots of modern conspiracy theories, the history of China, opium and opiods, the history of Artificial Intelligence, melancholy over the loss of empire and, love and power. And whether modern culture, despite its radicalism, is really part of the new system of power.

And the films are told in a different way - they are an emotional history of what went on inside the heads of all kinds of people.

Because in the age of the individual - what you felt and what you wanted and what you dreamed of were going to become the driving force across the world.

What was forgotten in that age was that much of what we feel is also formed by the society around us. Above all by the power structures.

And now those structures are decaying - everywhere - their weakness and uncertainty makes us feel empty and frightened of the future.

That is what is paralysing us - and blocking us from imagining different kinds of societies and a better future

Can't Get You Out Of My Head is an epic history that shows how and why that happened. How we made this particular world. And that it was not inevitable.

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The highly anticipated new work from journalist and Bafta award-winning filmmaker, Adam Curtis will premiere exclusively on BBC iPlayer on 11 February 2021. This new series of films tells the story of how we got to the strange days we are now experiencing.

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Document your insights with a postcard exchange!

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Document your insights with a postcard exchange!

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new programme on iplayer from Adam Curtis, posted by Lisa

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udging by their work, Adam Curtis and Diane Morgan appear to have little in common. Curtis is a Bafta-winning documentary film-maker in the business of making sense of everything. As a comedian best known for playing mockumentary film-maker Philomena Cunk, Morgan has mastered the art of knowing absolutely nothing. Yet here they are, good pals, linked via Zoom to discuss Curtis's new series of films, Can't Get You Out of My Head: An Emotional History of the Modern World.

If anything, Cunk might be the film-maker's target audience. By zooming out to look at pivotal historical moments as well as zeroing in on often obscure, compelling characters, Curtis sets out to engage viewers who aren't already immersed in current affairs. His new films take his approach to new levels by posing a basic, Cunk-like question, such as: "What is now?" What forces and human failings led us to these turbulent yet strangely static times, post-Trump and post-Brexit?

In more than eight hours, across six episodes, he takes in the past century via the seemingly disparate lives of characters including Jiang Qing, the power-hungry wife of Mao Zedong, Michael de Freitas, a revolutionary and civil rights activist in London, and Afeni Shakur, the Black Panther and mother of Tupac. Climate change, opioid addiction, conspiracy theories and artificial intelligence are all interwoven with Curtis's trademark blend of steady-voiced narration, archive footage (including lots of random people dancing in slow motion) and a hypnotic soundtrack.

When they speak, Curtis is at home in north London while Morgan is delirious with jet-lag and the effects of quarantine in a Sydney hotel room. They have even locked her windows. She is in Australia to film the second series of antipodean sitcom Frayed. If nothing else, lockdown has given her the chance to watch Curtis's new series twice. They start at the beginning: how do they even know each other?

Diane Morgan I accosted you at a BBC party, do you remember? I'd just seen Hypernormalisation and I got chatting to your assistant. I said: "What's Adam Curtis like?" and she said: "You'll meet him," and I said:"OH MY GOD!" You turned up, and I was quite embarrassing.

Adam Curtis We'd actually already met through Charlie Brooker at a Screenwipe party.

DM Oh yeah! I hadn't seen much of your stuff by then so I wasn't that bothered by you.

AC I noticed!

DM Then I discovered it all and I was, like, Jesus this is incredible. It's the combination of archive and music and your voice. And they feel like they were made just for me, which I realise is insane. I think I get so sucked into the stories that you choose and the people you concentrate on. They're not boring people. Like Jiang Qing! She could've been from Bolton. But I'm so fascinated with how you put it together and how long it takes. You must watch archive for hours. Do you have a theme in your head first?

AC Do you remember seeing me two years ago in Soho and shouting: "When is it coming out?!" Every time I met you you'd say it. It has taken three years. But I always start with a theme and the stories, which is what I spend most of my time researching. I like ambiguous characters. So in the new film there is a guy called Michael de Freitas, who is a revolutionary but also a vicious gangster, and I like that complexity.

DM I can't believe John Lennon and Yoko cut their hair off for him!

AC And then he stole their money.

DM Yeah, but their hair, Adam, their hair. They had lovely hair.

AC It's the twists and turns that I like. I have a guy called Phil who goes round the world to BBC offices and copies the master tapes from the cupboard in the back office, and brings back, say, everything shot in China since 1980. I just skim through the QuickTime files really fast and say: "Oh, I like that."

A still from Can't Get You Out of My Head. Photograph: BBC

DM Sometimes I'm watching and think: "Where is all this going?" And then by the end it all comes together like a beautiful collage and suddenly I feel like I've learned everything.

AC In the past, I've tended to focus on one argument about something. And with this one I had a question in my head, which is: why does no one have any other alternative visions of the future? Why are we stuck, when we're also dissatisfied? I wanted to trace different streams that lead to now. I also wanted it to feel like a multi-part novel but real.

DM When did you start thinking about that question?

AC It was over two years ago. Why, post-Trump and Brexit, did none of the people who hated Trump and Brexit have any alternative to offer? Why did they spend all their time going into the rabbit hole of conspiracy theories about Vladimir Putin rather than actually thinking: "Well, actually, if all these people are really pissed off, can we offer something better than weirdos like Donald Trump and strange dreams like Brexit?" They didn't. That was my theme and I had all these stories to fit together.

DM The whole thing about Britain is deluded self-confidence, right?

AC Yeah. And the reason I was interested in Michael de Freitas, who became known as Michael X, is that, a while ago, I met a couple of guys in Notting Hill who worked with him in the 60s. And I'd read [De Freitas's] book, where he said there was a sadness at the heart of England. These guys said the same thing, that there was a sort of melancholy in the English. [De Freitas] didn't like the racism, but he said there's something underneath that, which is a sort of melancholy about what they'd lost. And I think you still feel that now, not just among the Brexit voters, but you also feel it about the people who hated the Brexit voters because they go: "We've come to this?"

A still from Can't Get You Out of My Head. Photograph: BBC

DM And the films come right up to now. Is that why it took you so long, because you wanted to wait and see what was going to happen?

AC I wanted to do it after the US election, partly because, although we feel that all sorts of things have happened, if you actually look at it, nothing has happened politically since Trump and Brexit. There was a vast amount of hysteria but nothing else apart from a candidate who said: "I'm not Trump." And none of the structure of power or inequality has changed. And Covid has made that even more obvious, like a flash of lightning on a dark night, showing you the raw structure of power in our countries and that nothing has really changed.

DM It all makes sense. It's partly your calm, authoritative voice. I feel like you could be a cult leader. You could tell me that bananas were invented by the Polish secret service and I'd believe you. There's something hypnotic about it. Did you ever consider using someone else's voice?

AC I tried that, it didn't work out.

DM I suppose it's cheaper doing it yourself.

AC There's a brilliant parody of my voice online. Have you heard it?

DM No, but does it say: "But in fact the very opposite happened."?

AC Exactly.

DM But you know you're on to something if people imitate you.

AC I think it's something to do with the tension between the completely weird collage of stuff and a very calm voice. But what I try and put into my films through the archive is a feeling of the texture of the complexity of life, that people aren't simply good or bad.

DM It's a bit like with comedy, if you deliver something completely straight, it's funnier.

AC When I started out on television, I was a very young researcher working for Esther Rantzen.

DM On That's Life?!

AC Yes. Do you know the first film I made? It was the dog that says: "Sausages!". It got 20 million viewers and it was downhill from there. But the one thing she taught me - and she was pretty ruthless - was that there is just one rule in television: People who think they're funny aren't funny and people who don't think they're funny are incredibly funny. That's why playing it straight works.

DM Why is it all going straight to iPlayer?

AC Because you can make more complicated films for iPlayer. And you can make them longer. People watch things online with a different sensibility.

A still from Can't Get You Out of My Head. Photograph: BBC

DM They've chosen to see something, they've invested more?

AC Yeah. And therefore you can actually make things more complicated. You don't have to explain everything, they can stop and start.

DM What are you going to do next, or are you having a rest?

AC I'll go and find a good story. I do have a brutal theory that culture has reached a dead end.

DM I feel like that as well.

AC In the 1970s, the trades unions, who used to be a liberating force, had become this restrictive, corrupt and decadent force that actually stopped any change. I think culture might be the same thing now, that the culture has become this incredibly rigid, very restrictive force that pretends to be radical. And that, actually, all of us are trapped within the media and in culture, thinking we're all self-expressive, when in fact nothing we do changes anything. I'm very brutal about Tupac Shakur in the last film, about how he wanted to bring the Black Panthers back. But he took it away from politics and into culture, and then found he couldn't trust anyone. He was all on his own. Because the trouble with being self-expressive is you are on your own, and you're not very strong on your own.

DM I just feel like everything's played by the rules now. And I sort of long for people to do something totally mad and different. TV dramas are all about a kiddy that's gone missing and some coppers are staring at a lake. Or it's people making cakes. I think that's why I cling to these documentaries as a sort of raft.

AC Everything seems inevitable. This goes back to Philomena Cunk, who is a bit like Donald Trump. Trump would ask the most naive, stupid question. He'd go: 'Well, why are we fighting all these wars, which don't actually make the world a better place?" or, "Why did we send all our factories over to China, and everyone's taking opioids?" And the reason intelligent people don't ask those questions is because, actually, they just seem inevitable. Or they go: "Well, that's globalisation." And therefore you don't question anything. You don't make anything different. There's a sort of uptightness amongst the liberal middle classes.

DM I think we're amazed by people who don't care what other people think - it's almost like a superpower now.

AC Yes, which means the age of self-expression has become very rigid. One of the things I tried to put into these films but couldn't find the stories to do it, is that everyone is very self-conscious today and feels they're being watched. It's almost like you're in a Victorian novel, but actually there's no one there. There's something very deep in society at the moment. What I want to say to people is: we made the world the way it is; it didn't just happen. And if we did that, we can make it different. You can't say: "Oh, it's all going to be nice now Joe Biden's come back into power." Bad things happen because we and our leaders let them happen or created them. And if that's true, then we can change it. That's the optimistic thing I'm trying to say.
Can't Get You Out of My Head: An Emotional History of the Modern World is available on BBC iPlayer from Thursday 11 February

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'You could be a cult leader': Diane Morgan and Adam Curtis on Brexit, Trump and his new series

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udging by their work, Adam Curtis and Diane Morgan appear to have little in common. Curtis is a Bafta-winning documentary film-maker in the business of making sense of everything. As a comedian best known for playing mockumentary film-maker Philomena Cunk, Morgan has mastered the art of knowing absolutely nothing.

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posted by Iain

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posted by Iain

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What is the radical imagination? by Max Haiven and Alex Khasnabish

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What is the radical imagination? by Max Haiven and Alex Khasnabish

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Posted by lindsey - this is academic but brilliant as framing for us... it includes questions about working with radical imagination

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Wanda's mini minutes of development group meetings 13.1.21 & 20.1.21

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Wanda's mini minutes of development group meetings 13.1.21 & 20.1.21

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Mini Minutes or Meanderings of Memory meetings on 13 and 20 January 21

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Maniffesto Bach Samina - description of projects and process and principles

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Maniffesto Bach Samina - description of projects and process and principles

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Utopias Bach principles including what is a Utopia Bach, ideas for running meetings

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Utopias Bach principles including what is a Utopia Bach, ideas for running meetings

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Compiled by Lindsey from Mannifesto Bach by Lisa, Wanda and Samina, and collabatory discussions

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Compiled by Lindsey from Collabatory discussions

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Lisa says: What about Utopias Bach as a strawberry plant??

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Lisa says: What about Utopias Bach as a strawberry plant??

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Posted by Lisa

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About the project, her projects, process, working principles

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These are the webpages where Lindsey is trying to keep things as they emerge in a vaguely outward facing way!

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Prosiectau/Projects - Lindsey Colbourne (Heledd Wen)

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Of course, mapping will never be 'done', and it will - and can only be - a subjective view. I have tried to use people's own words and images wherever possible, to illustrate just how personal our maps are.

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- just click on a plus to add a document or image or link or to just write something ----> timeline moves right!

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Core partner meeting 13.1.21 mini-minutes by Samina

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Core partner meeting 13.1.21 mini-minutes by Samina

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Maniffesto Bach Lisa - description of projects and UB

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Maniffesto Bach Lisa - description of projects and UB