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From the Mourning of the World to Happy Mondays
This year I'm co-curating one of the stages at the Uncivilisation Festival. All manner of poetry, prose and performance will take place on the Woodland Stage, as well as workshops in the woods...
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doing the spring shift
There it goes again. Booooooooom! 4am, April 20. Bang on time. The bittern is back in the marshes. Gotta be spring out there, right? And yes, finally it is: bursting out of its cherry-plum celandine...
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52 FLOWERS; Japanese Cherry
south kensington, london 02 The cherry trees are in bloom all over Kensington. It is a London spring moment, when the city’s ornamental trees burst into flower before anywhere else: golden forsythia,...
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ROOTS, SHOOTS AND SEEDS: The Spear Carriers
Roots, Shoots and Seeds is a book about the local community food movement, set around the wide arable fields of East Anglia, following the tracks of the crops that grow in these clay and sandy soils,...
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EARTHLINES: holding a door open for the ancestors
"We stand for a land ethic: for real and deep connections to the land and to places, their inhabitants (human and nonhuman) and their stories. And so we stand for a culture which respects and values...
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Welcome to the new summer edition!
On Wednesday, May 1, the new national Transition Free Press published its on-line summer edition - 24 pages of full-on, full colour news and views. Great photographs, great articles, contributed by...
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Crossing tracks - a conversation with Jeppe Graugaard
Last winter I had a conversation with Jeppe Graugaard. We sat by the fire in my house and he switched on his tape recorder and though I felt bone-weary, bone-cold, exhausted by months of flu, I looked...
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ARCHIVE: The Sea Kale Project
Five years ago I began a walk down the Eastern Seaboard. It was called The Sea Kale Project. Originally the walk was going to be a springboard for a photographic exhibition and begin in Norfolk. In...
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Flight of the Butterflies
As the IEA reports ever-increasing carbon emissions, and Britain's environment minister denies any change in the climate in the last 17 years, what is the response of the truly awake person in the...
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Holding open a door (early morning)
There is a postcard downstairs from the Ashmolean Museum. It's the cornerstone of a noticeboard with pictures of plants and places I worked amongst over a decade ago. It sits between Dr Bach's garden...
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Where we are now - This Low Carbon Life Summer Update 2013 (Transition Norwich)
Midsummer 2013 and the new vegetable garden is flourishing. By the time the apples are ripe and the potatoes harvested this blog will be four years old. For three years we published posts daily along...
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52 FLOWERS: 12 Hemp
Hemp was originally the last flower in the Bush School section of the book. Most of the power plants in this chapter I worked with during my travelling years in Mexico and South America, but this one...
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Slow Train to Hebden Bridge
This month is all about time. I have been running up against a major deadline with the new edition of the Transition Free Press and haven't had a minute spare to write any posts. Ironic then that this...
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EARTHLINES 3: Exit from Fairyland
This week EarthLines publishes its fourth (Winter) issue. You can order your copy here. During 2012 I have been writing a regular column for EL called Life in Transition. For Issue 4 I wrote about...
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The Stage in the Woods
This is one of the stages where it’s all happening this year at Uncivilisation. Made from cob and wood and standing in a beechwood glade, this small theatre is a perfect set and setting for...
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ARCHIVE: Dog Days
Happy Lughnasa everyone! I am reposting a blog I wrote last year, just as my book, 52 Flowers That Shook My World was published. What strikes me is how this year (2013) has such a different mood to it....
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Dreaming of Uncivilisation
I will wait for a dream, I said to myself, as I went to meetings, swept the stage, ferried boxes of books, chopped vegetables, stacked the fire, and drank a glass of cider called Heart of Hampshire at...
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52 FLOWERS: 32 Box
As we head towards the autumn equinox, geese flying overhead, damsons falling in the lanes, I thought I'd post a piece about the treasures of winter. It's hard to give up the light and warmth of...
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ARCHIVE: we don't need no education
What a difference a year makes! Last Autumn I was writing posts once or twice a week, deeply embedded in the Transition movement. The summer was cold and dark, noisy with jubilee and sporting glory....
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the life story of that thing
“The question of solutions is a question of scale. In a given situation which is graspable—that can be quite big—there is a solution. But it won’t be a universal solution: it is global solutions that...
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