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The news about Paul Lister, and his determination to ‘re-wild’ his own patch of the Scottish highlands is a classic story of contemporary Britain, and it has a lot to say about the situation facing the church in this fair isle too.
First there is the fantastic story of the multi millionaire businessman, who having bought his own patch of Bonnie Scotland has decided to return it to the way nature intended, spending millions on bringing back boars and moose, planting native trees and plants, and even making desperate attempts to bring back wolves and bears too.
Then there’s the problems - he has fenced his estate in, enraging the walkers and climbers who have the hard won freedom to explore them thar hills. More than that, if his estate is fenced, then it cant be a wilderness, its a zoo, and in a zoo you cant let the nasty animals eat the nice ones!
Its a story that will go on and on until one day the money runs out, or somebody lets Lister have his way. On a personal level, I have a lot of sympathy for the idea of re-wilding the countryside, but in all honesty I cant see it happenning in the UK. The British countryside is a vast money making machine, reintroducing animals like wolves into it would sound a death knell for shooting estates and sheep farms for a start.
And this leads me on to the church.
I would dearly love to see the church re-wilded. Like Scotland, the church has the appearance of wildness. But in reality the wild place it once was, is no more. Just as Scotland has been tamed, its natural appearance transformed, and many of its natural inhabitants hunted into extinction, so the church is practically unrecognisable from what it once was.
Like Scotland and its over abundance of red deer, which many think are beautiful and pretty wild in themselves, the church has become overpopulated with grazers, who roam around looking pretty, fighting with each other and generally just munching up the foliage.
It is the high population of red deer which means that Scotland will be unable to re instate its natural vegetation, the red deer just scoff it. A consistent cull of red deer is already necessary just to maintain the vegetation it has got. The heather that has come to be the symbol of scots mountainside is in fact a weed, a parasite which smothers the growth of anything new, or anything ancient which seeks rebirth.
The venerable scottish thistle can still be found, bristling in its spikyness - but its not a very attractive plant really, not when all those thorns get on your fingers.
In the church we have our own flora and fauna - we might consider our traditions and practises as flora - they cover the church, they appear to be the distinctive feature of the church, and all too often they smother the birth of anything new, or the re birth of anything ancient.
Where a venerable outpost of early Christianity exists, its often too spiky for us to cope with.
What is the answer for Scotland? First bring back boars - we need pigs who root around and stir up the ground. In the church, we too need those who will root around, make a mess, be a bit dangerous - dig stuff up, turn it over, make a noise.
Bring back predators - lets be honest whatthe church needs like a hole in the head (I should know, I’ve got a hole in my head) is more deer. More people to look pretty, but be good for nothing but shooting. We dont need those pew fillers, those ‘Christians’ who refuse to let the notion of discipleship affect their lives in any way other than what social groups they mix in, and what they will watch on tele.
Lets get some wolves in, who will kill these deer, or at least scare them off. Lets reduce the deer number, whittle them down. Lets get some bears in too - big brutes who can really make some impact on the world.
Lets find some of that old vegetation which has died out, and encourage it to grow again. Lets embrace the dirty, the dangerous, the wild.
Lets say no to the sanitised version of church, and say yes to re-wilding.
But lets not put a fence around it - instead of creating a zoo which looks like a wild place, lets create a real wildness - that spreads like a virus over the world. And guess what, that needs the estate managers, those who have grown fat and confortable on the money making activities of the church to change their ways.
Lets accept the fact that making a living out of this is not what its about, this is not an enterprise! Its not a business! This should be a wild place, with wild people and wild ideas - ideas about changing the world, about self denial, about love, about compassion, about God.
Let’s pray that God, who is the ultimate multi millionaire, will re-wild us, killing off those who are having a negative impact, and planting new growthin the old vegetation. I see signs of wildness, shadows of it, pockets of it… I see it in World Horizons, I see it in the Simple Way, I see it in alternative worship, I see it in the new monastics… but I long for the day when the real wildness will break out, and we’ll be back to the way we should be.
(Except now I’m worried that I’m a deer, when I ought to be a moose, or a pig, or a wolf… or perhaps a red squirrel. The red bit is right anyhow.)
And their so called ‘free’ album.
I’m sick of it.
I’m sick of their whining vocals for a start.
And their overhyped music.
But even more than that.
I’m sick of all the crap that’s been talked about this wretched album.
Even that burk of a toff who leads the CONservative party has bumptiously jumped on their bandwagon.
Why cant people see its a con?
Except, I’m glad to say for my old friend, turned superstar musician Steve Lawson who points out succintly:
“Radiohead didn’t ‘give away their album for free’: no, what they did was use a low-ish resolution copy of most of the tracks from the album as a way of generating MASSIVE publicity for a normal CD release, but also monetized their obsessional fan-base by selling vinyl to people who don’t even own record players. They used the leverage they had from already being one of the world’s most successful bands to create MILLIONS of pounds worth of column inches and airtime in every conceivable media channel. The amount of money they ‘made’ from their venture HAS to have factored in the amount of money they SAVED that they would normally have spent on advertising, and the amount over and above any ad campaign they could ever afford that they got from the stunt.”
Yes! That’s the point. IT WAS A STUNT.
I expect that Steve, being the old muso that he is, probably likes Radiohead, and he has every right to.
But I don’t, I dont like their music, I dont like their style, and most of all I really object to their quasi anti establisment bull shit.
GUESS WHAT GUYS - YOU’RE PART OF THE SYSTEM - STOP TRYING TO SCAM US INTO THINKING YOU’RE GIVING AWAY YOUR STUFF.
Nice to get that off my chest.
I had to do a birkman test questionaire today for work, and guess what… it showed me that:
I am a planner - yup I knew that.
I am suited to indirect communication - that’ll be me then.
I am interested in creative things - oh gosh… really?
I suppose that as someone who’s job is to plan indirect communication in a creative way, it seems like I’m well suited.
Bit miffed that it said I should be a lawyer though!
I am not a fan of personality tests, as I think that if you are self aware, you shouldnt need them. I was assured this one was different, I’m yet to be convinced.
I am becoming more and more convinced that one of the most significant problems in our society is money.
The story goes that Jesus told his disciples, ‘its easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.’
There’s a lot about that which makes sense to me. I honestly think that one of the pronciple reasons we arent a fairer, more just society is that we are too obsessed with getting and keeping money.
This follows on from my previous post, which groaned about the way our society is totally based upon the need for a growing economy, and the fact that the government exists in no small part to look after the interests of big business, as they are inexstricable from the needs of society as a whole.
My view on this is that we are too rich in our society. We have too much. If we had less, we would still be able to make do. But instead we have a lot, and we tie ourselves in to needing more. To get the nicer house, in the better area, we must work a bit harder, in a better paying job.
As we give ourselves over to work, we abandon the needs of others, who come a poor second to us when it comes to doling out the loot. It was love others AS yourselves, remember?
As we separate, living increasingly isolated lives, out of community with one another, leaving old people alone in their houses until its time for them to go into a home, as more and more single people make home by themselves, as marriages break up and divorcees become single parents, we all find ways of getting what we need to make our lives better.
But in doing so, we are participating in an unjust system, we are bringing war on people many miles away (war over oil, over gold, over collapsing brain drain economies), and we bring misery.
The kingdom of God, we are told, is justice, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit. Our rich lifestyles bring the opposite. It really is harder for us to enter the kingdom of God, than for us or a camel to pass through the eye of a needle.
Until we can collectively turn our backs on this way of living, we can never exepect to see the Kingdom of God on earth.
The maverick Scientist James Lovelock, who has consistently been the outspoken forerunner of climate change science was interviewed in the guardian at the weekend.
I’ve only just got round to reading it, and as is to be expected from the original science malcontent, it makes rather grim reading for those of us who are keen to make an impact on the world.
Lovelock’s view is that we have gone long past the tipping point in terms of climate change. There is no point in making the kind of consumer lifestyle changes that are promoted - switching to renewable electricity and so on.
His view is that in the next few decades there will be dramatic climate changes which change the face of the world, desertising parts of Europe, flooding parts of London, so on and so forth. There are also suggestions of a flood of immigrants coming here as climate refugees, and the notion that we may need to synthesise food… The latter I recongise is already with us, the first smacks of the fears of an old man.
Rather than advise us to cut our emissions or change our lifestyles, he says: “Enjoy life while you can. Because if you’re lucky it’s going to be 20 years before it hits the fan.”
At the same time as finding these claims deplorable, I am also aware of the massive scale of change that is needed if we really are to change the world. It simply isnt enough for middle class people to recycle, and to buy freerange eggs. Either the majority of society needs to change their lifestyles completely, or else I fear Lovelock’s predictions are likely to come true.
Over the coming years wars really will be fought over food and water, nuclear power will have to be our main source of energy - with all of its risks. People will die on a massive scale and only those wealthy enough to protect themselves will survive.
The trouble is that I dont see many people really being willing to make the necessary changes in their lives. Why? Because we’re bound into a system that is so reliant on a growing economy, that it is impossible for us to opt out.
Our very governmental systems have evolved to promote the interests of those companies which bring in the wealth, we’re busy storing up treasures on earth.
There needs to be some effort put into fiding ways we can live outside of this structure, because unless there is a way, not enough people will make the shift, and then we’ll all suffer. More importantly the first ones to go will be those who deserve it least.
yeah I use a pc, yeah it doesnt look as cool as your apple, yeah I couldnt give two wotsits, put this in your pipe and smoke it you style over substance white plastic toxic tyrants.
Apple could do with getting somewhat greener,
so if you are an apple user, stop being so smug.
It doesnt make you intrisically ‘cooler’ than the rest of us, no matter what you think.
It doesnt mean you’re anti establishment, no matter what what you think.
It doesnt mean that you’re much cleverer than us becuase you can use a mouse with one button, no matter what you think.
It does mean you’re party to Apple’s bizarre policy of using dangerous materials and un fixable technology.
So there.
Thanks Greenpeace for helping me out with this rant.
I heard from a friend who works stacking shelves in Tesco, about a crafty little move the supermarket giant like to pull during the festive season.
Last night a merchandising man was wondering up and down the rows putting up prices of every day items, by a few pence here and there.
Apparently Tesco have noticed that during the Christmas hols people pay less attention to the prices of their usual shopping items, they are far too concerned with finding extra supplies of mince pies and the like.
Then before it’s been noticed, at the end of Christmas, Tesco take their prices back down, so we all wonder ‘how come I spent so much at Christmas?’
A few pence here, a few pence there, spread over millions of purchases, must make them an absolute fortune to add to their already inflated Christmas takings.
Every little helps? Yeah right.
I read that the definition of a computer virus is: “…a software program capable of reproducing itself and usually capable of causing great harm to files or other programs on the same computer; “a true virus cannot spread to another computer without human assistance”…”
Now when you come to consider the way that now millions of office workers are using facebook during work time, and the incredible speed of growth as the virus gets into more and more systems… facebook sure seems like a bit of malware.
The Times quotes Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos, who said: “Websites like Facebook, Bebo and MySpace fall into the category of websites which can easily gobble up hours of worktime and distract from the employees’ real duties. Facebook is a procrastinator’s paradise”
The Sindie says: “In London, two-thirds of companies are banning or restricting use of the famous website, while some have made it clear that visiting the sites at work is a sackable offence. City firms, including Crédit Suisse and Dresdner Kleinwort, have taken the lead in the crack-down, following similar bans in America and Canada.
“British Gas, the Metropolitan Police and Lloyds TSB were among organisations named as having installed internet filters preventing access to the site.”
Why are they doing this? Because this pernicious site is gobbling up the capacity of workers and their computers, like a nasty little worm virus hidden on the system. A worm after all is defined as: “an independent program that replicates from machine to machine across network connections often clogging networks and information systems as it spreads.”
Or perhaps its more like a Trojan, which I found was defined as: “An apparently useful and innocent program containing additional hidden code which allows the unauthorized collection, exploitation, falsification, or destruction of data.”
And with the recent revelation that Myspace had deleted the accounts of 29,000 sex offenders - who were (it is implied) collecting information and exploiting opportunities, falsifying identities and engaging in destructive behaviour, there is clearly a link.
The disposable heroes of hiphoprisy said that TV is the drug of the nation, and Michael Franti later added that Sattelite is immaculate reception… and it seems to me that just like TV, ’social notworking’ is eating away at the heart of the collective psyche.
The lyrics from that excellent song could easily be replaced: for example…
‘(T.V./Bebo) is the reason why less than ten percent of our nation reads books daily’
‘(T.V./Facebook) is the stomping ground for political candidates’
‘remote control over the masses’
‘(T.V./Myspace) is the place where the pursuit of happiness has become the pursuit of trivia’
So we have facebook as: Virus, Worm, Trojan, and opiate. Told you I didnt like it! I dont think much of TV either.
George Monbiot has a good groan about ‘ethical consumerism’ which I have always said is an oxymoron - yes buy ethical products but only if you are going to cut your consumption overall…
The eloquent Mr Monbiot says it better than I: “…Green consumerism is becoming a pox on the planet. If it merely swapped the damaging goods we buy for less damaging ones, I would champion it. But two parallel markets are developing - one for unethical products and one for ethical products, and the expansion of the second does little to hinder the growth of the first. I am now drowning in a tide of ecojunk. Over the past six months, our coat pegs have become clogged with organic cotton bags, which - filled with packets of ginseng tea and jojoba oil bath salts - are now the obligatory gift at every environmental event. I have several lifetimes’ supply of ballpoint pens made with recycled paper and about half a dozen miniature solar chargers for gadgets that I do not possess…”
Cut consumption… lets not prat around telling everyone how green we are by consuming our way into the future!
I dont like it.
I dont have a myspace.
I dont do facebook.
I dont do friends reunited.
this blog is the nearest I get.
Bah humbug.
And anyway, its social databasing, not networking - and anyway, its just a way for people to make money. dont be fooled. Grrrr.
And dont you think its annoying looking at those rubbishy pages, with annoying pictures of people making innane comments, half the time just plugging some crappy website?
Just me then. That’s the way I like it to be honest.
Apparently today was environment day. I wish someone had told me, I wouldnt have stuffed that carrier bag down that seal’s throat, and I would tried not to race my hummer quite as much.
Am I alone in finding that kind of thing really shallow?
Surely its obvious to us all, that an environment day isnt going to cut the mustard, it merely encourages us to consume environmentalism as a commodity, rather than cut down our obsession with consumption which is itself driving the environmental crisis.
As long as we continue to define ourselves by how and what we consume, we arent going to solve anything.
When in hole, stop digging.
So Russia is getting somewhat belligerant, and threatening to point their nasty missiles at us, if the US start sprouting missile banks here and there.
I’ve blogged before that I dont mind cold wars, and prefer them immeasurably to hot ones.
And I’m feeling like I dont really blame Putin for thinking his lot might be a target. After all, they tend to have a different opinion to us on various matters, and these things are important…
What really needs to happen is the Nuclear disarmament that has been oft talked about, seldom acted upon. Well there’s a thing.
You know what, its kind of spooky but I feel like I can almost hear someone saying…
“We want you to disarm, and by the way we’re just upgrading ours,
Cos you’re bad and we’re good.
And we dont make mistakes, like invading people,
They are more like ‘tactical errors’.
And we wont shoot you with our horrid bombs. Honest.
Now put yours in the bin, or we’ll consign you to the axis of… EVIL!
Cos the thing is you see, you are whats known as volatile.
Which means you might harbour terrorists on your soil,
invade other people,
do nasty things like kill people you dont like,
supress freedoms,
disagree with us…
stuff like that.
No seriously. Put them in the bin.
No seriously!
Or else we’ll blow you up.”
Two contrasting tales can be found in the Guardian today, the first, the Harrods allotments, for which the well heeled can pay £1000.00 to have jeeves plant some parsnips. Just filthy is what I call it.
The whole thing of Harrods is abhorrent to me anyhow, but this latest wheeze just makes me feel a bit ill. The whole thing just reeks of greed and wastefulness, all the more disgusting when we know how little many live on in this world.
And then another tale, about Lush cosmetics giving cash to a bunch of anti road campaign groups. Now for sure, this is an attempt to ‘raise their profile’, but all the same, money talks. And I know Lush aint exactly feeding the masses with their expensive soaps, but I dont expect them to. There’s plenty of other ethical brands out there selling stuff that is good, at high prices, fair enough I say. These things are expensive. Hence the reason I dont buy ‘em!
But here’s the rub, they put their money where their mouth is, and that is real. Nobody can take that away.
And of course, what brought it to my attention, was that interestingly enough its the same sum £1000.00 - each of the campaign groups were handed a grand, meanwhile Horrids were charging a grand for a bespoke allotment.
Oh sweet heaven, I’ve got the taste of bile in my throat once more. Now where’s that sick bag.
Paul Wolfowitz should do the decent thing and resign.
I am not the only one who is sick of schemers who look after their own before others. The World Bank certainly doesnt need that kind of person.
Instead of hanging on to his untenable position, Wolfowitz should read the writing on the wall. And the white house… well enough said. They have a record of hanging on to losers to the grim death these days.
Its almost as if the leader of the world’s only superpower was rather under pressure!
And as if the news weren’t confirmation enough, my bushisms calendar today provided another pearl: “Rarely is the question asked: Is our children learning?”
Enough said.
on the way to the beach today, I had the misfortune to visit a certain supermarket… y’know it’s name is four letters long, and its full of mum’s slapping their own bottoms with delighted grins on their faces.
Anyway, as I sidestepped the clothing section I was visually assaulted by a gang of signs demanding: “why pay more?”
And as I stared them in their yellow eyes, I felt a rant coming on….
Why pay more?
I’ll tell you why.
Because cheap is not always best.
Because less is not always more.
Because you have taken a short cut past quality.
And a swerve around ethical trade.
Because buying a tee shirt for three quid wont make me value it.
And buying a pair of trousers for a fiver wont make me think about what I’m buying.
Or who made them.
Or how much they were paid for them.
Or what kind of toxic processes were involved in their manufacture.
Or how much debt the factory workers are in, because of the pittance they are paid.
Or how many suicides there have been in the cotton farming community that grew your low grade stuff.
Because you have bulk bought, and helped to wipe out small businesses.
Because you have competed so fiercely that you have wiped out the little guys.
Because through what you do and who you are, you promote nothing less than greed.
Because you have used millions of barrels of fossil fuel to supply your distribution network.
And you’ve been caught out treating your workers badly.
Because we think that higher quality and ethically sourced products are worth more.
Dont give me your signature on the ethical trading initiative. I’m not interested.
Dont give me your crap about quality. It isnt true.
I prefer to pay more, and when I cant afford to pay more, which is most of the time, I prefer not to buy anything at all!
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