In an email exchange responding to my review of her and Chris’ book, Anne Douglas contacted me about the point I’d made about artists today and the “material question”. She writes that:

“this very point was raised by a PhD student from Berlin/Bauhaus Weimar. Her work is excellent on sea level rise and she was very clear that there would be no way she could function in the way the Harrisons had and asked whether that undermined her potential as an artist working on ecological issues. My response at the time was that she was an artist and needed to focus on working within whatever constraints life posed as excellence frequently emerges out of very severe constraints”.

She also notes that when Newton Harrison “addressed Masters students at ECA in Edinburgh, he began by saying that their challenges to be artists in the current world would be much, much greater than his own…” adding that: “then there is Hannah Arendt, ‘We are born unasked into the world” and have no control over the circumstances of our birth. Thereafter we have some and therefore need to invest in thinking for ourselves”. 

She goes on to say taht while her points don’t directly address my thoughts about the economics of the art world and how eco-art practices “can/will be supported when so much of institutional life, not least education in art schools, is fractured. It would make an important book around the kind of judgements artists need to make in how to become recognised…”.

I very much hope someone out there is busy preparing to research and write just such a book, not from the usual “critical Left” position within the art world, but with a clear understanding of the radical shift of mentality needed. One that moves us beyond the myopia imposted by a disciplinary-based education system to a view of life in which creativity is seen as intrinsic to all worthwhile human activity – Joseph Beuys’ notion that “everyone is an artist”. One in which everyone’s practices are understood as located within an ensemble of skills and orientations rather than in specialisms all-too-often linked to exclusive notions of authority and power.

Introduction

Anne Douglas and Chris Fremantle, authors of this highly significant book and themselves artist researchers, worked closely with Helen Mayer Harrison (1927-2018) and Newton Harrison (1932-2023) – collectively known as the Harrisons or The Harrison Studio – both on particular projects and more generally. Douglas co-produced On the Deep Wealth of this Nation: Scotland and Fremantle produced Greenhouse Britain, Losing Ground, Gaining Wisdom. (He is also one of the editors of Eco-art in Action: Activities, Case Studies, and Provocations for Classrooms and Communities, 2022, a field guide that offers practical solutions to critical environmental challenges that includes Newton Harrison). Which is to say they write both as observant participants working from direct first-hand involvement in the Harrisons’ processes, and from a researcher’s concern with rigorous creative ‘thinking with’. Thinking that in the course of their study ranges across the arts, particularly in relation to engagement with environmental concerns, but also across the work of a variety of important scientists, philosophers, and other thinkers.

The result is less an ‘art book’ in the usual sense and more an unusual and highly important text that uses the work of the Harrisons as its focus. A text that for the most part avoids the usual biographical / aesthetic approach to analyse a particular artistic oeuvre by focusing on how the Harrisons’ unfolding process addresses a series of fundamental and pressing ecological questions. That is, it asks, in the face of a deepening and global eco-social crisis, how can:

“…arts practices be reimagined in the face of the escalating number of manifestations of the crisis? How might they help us re-imagine ourselves in the world outside of human exceptionalism and progress, cultural narratives that have dominated the Western world for more than 500 years since the Renaissance? Can the arts offer alternative ways of knowing that counter the authority of ‘techoscience’ to shape Earth as an object for our human convenience”? (p. 11)

These questions are at heart then of a book that takes the intertwining of art with other approaches to the world central to our need for continuing self-education very seriously indeed. A book that can also be read, however, as a substantive refutation of the performance artist Andrea Fraser’s observation about the relationship between art, wealth and politics. That’s to say it proposes how we counter her claim that: “Artists are not part of the solution…We are part of the problem”. (In Sarah Thornton 33 Artists in 3 Acts, p. 376)

In this context it is entirely in keeping with both the Harrisons’ and the authors’ approach that this book: “will be made open access within three years of publication thanks to Path to Open“.

What colours this review.

Any review is inevitably coloured by the reviewer’s own concerns. I have read this book as someone with a European, and primarily British, cultural background, while keeping in mind that it concerns practices developed by the Harrisons against the background of American culture and economics.  My response to it is also coloured by two related preoccupations. Firstly, by long engagement with the complexities and responsibilities of our senses of place, particularly as these are explored through deep mapping, an approach with some similarities to that of the Harrisons’. Secondly, with a preoccupation shared with the Harrisons, one encapsulated in their understanding that they would: “focus their work on the web of life and the journey that took them on”, one that had “the potential to form a powerful pedagogy”. (p. 208) That is to say, I share their preoccupation with life-long self-education. (Significantly, Helen Mayer Harrison initially worked as a scholar and educationalist).

These two preoccupations are entangled in many working friendships. With, for example, the Irish eco-artist Cathy Fitzgerald, who learned directly from the Harrisons and has now set up the Haumea Ecoversity; with the members of the Welsh collaborative Utopias Bach; and with a 50-year-long friendship with a versatile and intensely practical artist, Simon Read. Simon has pursued a line of work independently of the Harrisons’ influence but, like them, has immersed himself in environmental debates and developed a complex ‘ensemble’ practice informed by interdisciplinary collaboration. One that allows him to make informed interventions in matters primarily relating to estuary landscapes, in particular estuarine salt-marsh. I see these working friendships as active ‘in the spirit of’ the questions this book addresses, as establishing integrated, experimental, creative research networks that connect people so as to engage with and share the concept of change and to support decisions made in relation to the landscapes in which they live. I stress all this because, although in one respect this is very obviously a book about the Harrisons’ work, in another it can be read as celebrating an emerging mentalité of which they are highly significant examples.

“Thinking with ….”

The book presents the Harrisons’ work as “particularly prescient” in anticipating the orientation of thinkers grounded in scientific and philosophical disciplines who are facilitating convergences of scientific and aesthetic insight. (Examples include Bruno Latour, Isabelle Stengers, Donna Haraway and Anna Tsing). In particular, they draw on Stengers’ account of learning to ‘think with’ the philosopher and mathematician Alfred North Whitehead. An engagement that helped Stengers to imagine and resist “ready-made” models and to avoid falling into despair at the socio-environmental situation we face. Something the authors clear hope this book will help their readers in doing. Consequently the second chapter of the book, Thinking With’ Whitehead, Stengers and the Harrisons, sets out the authors’ use of key concepts from Whitehead’s writing on process philosophy, seen in turn as prefiguring “ecological thinking in the sense of understanding nature as emergent through a process of deep entanglement”. This provides them with “a point of entry into learning what our responsibility towards the work of the Harrisons might be” since Whitehead, as a scientist and mathematician, worked with “a unified concept that takes into account sensory experience, feelings, and emotions”. (p. 29) The chapter then uses Whitehead’s thinking to discuss the Harrisons’ work between 1971 and 1974 and the process of critically identifying “the collisions and contradictions” that led the artists to conclude that the forms of the work made during this period were “fundamentally flawed”, (p. 35) although essential to the development of The Lagoon Cycle, the focal topic of Chapter 3.

In Chapter 3 we are introduced to the development of a poetics of dialogue and the visual storytelling that then appeared in the Harrisons’ work. A shift  that enabled them to frankly acknowledge that: “the universe is a multileveled discourse, a conversation in many languages – biological, chemical, physical – most of which we cannot even perceive, much less understand. Within this discourse, every place is bespeaking the story of its own becoming. Everyone is in this conversation, as is everything”. (p. 80)

Chapter 3 is pivotal in setting up the basis for discussion of “the relationship between ‘system’ and ‘improvisation’ and between ‘discourse’ and ‘the political’” as they appear in The Lagoon Cycle and other early works, in identifying central qualities in the Harrisons’ “approach as artists” that are “also potentially powerful” factors “in the development of the arts’ relationship to ecology”. (p. 88) What then follows are three chapters that address the particular and complex nature of the central aspects of the Harrisons’ overall approach. Chapter Four explores their approach to improvisation, Chapter Five to the poetics and aesthetics of systems, and Chapter Six to the political.

Rich in examples drawn from both the Harrisons’ work and that of relevant artists and thinkers as various as the novelist and critic Amitav Ghosh, the free jazz improvisor and philosopher Gary Peters, the musician and writer on the raga tradition of northern India Amit Chaudhuri, visual artists Joseph Beuys, Hans Haacke and Mierle Laderman Ukeles, art critic Jack Burnham, and scholars and thinkers Hannah Arendt, Frijof Capra, Julia Kristeva, Brian Massumi, and Morse Peckham, these chapters offer an extraordinary wealth of insight to the reader. As such they invite close and reflective study and I simply cannot summarise these in a review since each would require an essay in itself. It must be sufficient to say that they offer considerable insight, for example, into the intellectual and emotional context in which the development of different aspects of the Harrisons’ eco-social working process is best understood, a valuable analysis of, and warning about, the dangers of eco-fascism, and a clear sense of the “aesthetic tactics” employed by the Harrisons “to woe us as audiences”. (p. 156) A capability predicated on “the refined skill that artworks embody of vivid communication and innovation, making present those experiences for which many of us would otherwise have no words”. (p. 161).       

Chapter Seven pivots on the relationship between Newton Harrison’s interest in the “seemingly obvious questions’ asked by particular artists’ work “that, once asked, become transformative” when viewed in the context of Stengers’ very similar concern to “search for and make meaning, rather than presume that meaning is given”. (p. 177) In addition to a discussion of the importance in this respect to the Harrisons of work of particular artists – for example, Giotto, Rembrandt, Cezanne and Joseph Albers, but also Chaucer and Charles Dickens – this leads to an account of the ways in which the Harrisons engaged in dialogue with other contemporary artists. These include the artist, biologist, and environmental educator Brandon Ballengée, the multifaceted environmental artist Lauren Bon, Tim Collins and Reiko Goto-Collins’ collaborative work investigating the intersection of art, ecology, and the public realm, Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens’ radical feminist art, and Ruth Wallen’s work as an interdisciplinary artist and writer dedicated to ecological and social justice. The discussion leads, perhaps inevitably, to a highly significant section entitled Pedagogy: Curriculum Proposals. Highly significant because it addresses a fundamental educational issue identified by Tim Collins in 2023, one largely obscured by the presuppositions of possessive individualism that continue to dominate Western thinking about art. Namely that:

“Artists are unprepared to take a productive role in civic discourse. Students graduate without the tools and bridging experience to allow them to learn the languages and process in the areas of ecology, politics, and sociology, and are therefore unable to enter into effective creative communication … There isn’t a single department in the country with a programme area which addresses the changing meaning of nature, restoration ecology, and bio-technology”. (p.185)

This section is followed by one that focuses on exchanges between the Harrisons  and Ballengée, Lauren Bon, Reiko Goto-Collins and Tim Collins, Sprinkle and Stephens, and Ruth Wallen, and on the ways these artists’ practices have drawn on the Harrisons’ work but also on how they differ. It also references the 2022 Listening to the Web of Life Interdisciplinary Workshop, an event that prompts the authors to set out the mesh of influences that inform the participants’ work and at which an artist like Cathy Fitzgerald felt encouraged to take on something of the mantle of Harrisons’ work. As the authors set out in the final section of the chapter, perhaps the primary stress in any summary of the Harrison’s work must be on: “the fundamental importance of learning, experimentation, and pedagogy in the relationship of art to the environment”. (p. 211). Read in this light the book seems to me to constitute the basis for an in-depth and radical curriculum for contemporary eco-social art education; indeed for art education as a whole.

Significantly, the final chapter of the book, entitled Conclusions, offers the reader no such thing. Instead it consists of a series of questions about the impact and value of the Harrisons’ work. This is entirely in keeping with the authors’ understanding of the Lagoon Cycle as marking the point in the Harrisons’ work where the concern: “shifts from solving a problem” – more specifically one of food production – “to participating in a dialogue with the universe, while coming to terms with the processes of climate change that we have set in motion”. (p. 216)     

The form of the final chapter also begs the question of how to conclude this review. Perhaps simply by saying that I find it profoundly useful and know I will read and reference it again and again. Also that, while it has little relevance to the particular ‘art-making’ aspect of my own ‘ensemble practice’, it is profoundly relevant to pretty much every other aspect of that practice; to work done as a conversationalist committed to critical solicitude, as a writer and mentor, and as somebody participating in a diverse range of eco-social and educational projects and experiments.

Finally, I need to ask whether I have any substantive criticisms, reservations, or concerns about this book? The answer is ‘no’. I do, however, have one very small concern.

The principle market for a book like this is likely to be seen as the USA by its publishers. The Harrisons established themselves as artists in the USA in the 1970s and 1980s. That is to say at a time when its economy, education system, and the taxation breaks given to foundations, provided very substantive financial possibilities in terms of sponsorship for the arts. A context that, in so far as we were aware of it in the UK, suggested something of a ‘golden age’ to those of us setting out on our careers. The Harrisons benefitted in their formative years from both that situation and financial input from Newton’s parents.

On graduating from Yale in 1965, Newton at once obtained an assistant professorship and took up a similar post when the couple moved to California in 1967. In California Helen gained a director’s position in a university extension education program which she later resigned to collaborate more fully with Newton. By 1980 both Harrisons had become tenured professors in the Visual Arts Department at UC San Diego. While none of this in any way detracts from their very considerable achievements, this background is relevant, or so it seems to me, to our understanding of the socio-cultural context in which the Harrisons’ achievements as eco-artists who were also educators developed.

As a book with a strong educational orientation, I would have liked the authors to have acknowledged the economic context that framed the Harrisons’ work given that they are in effect offering a model of practical orientation to younger artists. Younger artists today, at least in the European countries I am familiar with, will almost certainly be unable to achieve anything like the level of material security, intellectual support, or net-working opportunities that the Harrisons’ institutional status gave them. It would have been helpful, at least for readers in a European context, if this disparity had been acknowledged, if only tacitly.

As Sarah Thornton’s account of “the world’s most important artists” quoted earlier makes clear, the core criteria of the international art world today are predicated on the mentality of a culture industry that has the primacy of economically-driven entrepreneurship at its heart. A mentality with no interest in the development of the ethics central to any genuine eco-social arts practice. Even those few younger artists fortunate enough to gain the economic security of an academic post today will have nothing like the time and creative freedom available to the Harrisons after 1980. Not only will they be subject to much greater teaching and administrative work loads, but to a State-controlled regime of research audit enforced by economic sanction. As I have already said, none of this in any way detracts from the value of the Harrisons’ achievement or the value of this book but, if it is to become the valuable basis for education it deserves to be, this is an issue that will need to be taken into account when reflecting on eco-social artists’ engagement with the web of life. However, I accept that the authors may have felt that this issue lay outside the brief they set themselves.      

All this said, I believe this is an immensely valuable book that needs to be studied and digested in the widest possible educational context, not simply by those involved in teaching the arts and by students on degree and masters level art and design courses. Whether or not that will happen is obviously an open question. However, if by ill-chance this book does not find its rightful place on college and university reading lists, which are still all-too-often compiled by academics sheltering behind the narrow protectionism inherent in disciplinary specialism, I can only fervently hope that it becomes an ‘underground classic’. One of those books that lively and imaginative individuals and groups will delight in sharing, discussing and acting upon.          

A while ago I came across an advertisement for a book called Looking for a Sign: Contemporary Art, Magic and Language (2024), published in Ireland by Durty Books. In a fit of curiosity, and because I’ve a long-time interest in old songs and recent theories that relate to what, broadly speaking, might be called ‘magical understandings’, I bought a copy. Perhaps, before I go on, I need to say a little more about why I would do that. In 2018 I presented an illustrated talk to art students at the University of Dundee called Un-disciplining practices: some paradoxes and possibilities. Part of the introduction goes as follows.

“Increasingly, the assumptions that underwrite disciplinarity are being questioned. Isabelle Stengers is a Belgian professor of philosophy. She trained as a chemist and has won international acclaim for her work in the philosophy of science. Starhawk is an American writer, teacher, activist and leading exponent of feminist neopaganism and ecofeminism – or, as she might say, a witch. From the perspective of academic disciplinarity, these two women are separated by an unbridgeable divide. Yet in Capitalist Sorcery: Breaking the Spell, Stengers and her co-author Philippe Pignarre present Starhawk as somebody reclaiming an art of participation that deals directly with pragmatic concerns about effects and consequences”.

Put bluntly, Stengers and Pignarre’s book insists that we take witches seriously. I suppose I had hoped that Looking for a Sign might take up and extend the thinking that underpins that argument. And, if one understands that the point that Pignarre and Stengers want to make by references people like Starhawk and the practices they have developed is that they are ways of communicating with what Stengers describes as the ‘unknowns’ of modernity – with all that it fails to adequately address – then perhaps to a very small extent it does.

Andrew Gojfey is the translator of Capitalist Sorcery: Breaking the Spell. What follows is in part a free paraphrase of points made in his introduction to that book: On the Witch’s Broomstick. To help explain its orientation he asks whether it’s possible to take seriously somebody who claims to have been attacked by a sorcerer? The answer, he insists with the book’s authors, should be “yes”. But  on the condition that we understand that the modern approach that frames such questions, namely that of psychoanalysis, is predicated on an unjustifiable pretension. Namely, that as a discipline it has scientific authority to make universally valid pronouncements about ‘the unconscious’. Stengers points out, however, that psychoanalysis fails to acknowledge what it does when it claims to explain its curative effects through quasi-scientific notions like ‘transference’. Stengers argument is that therapeutic practitioners in non-modern cultures are ‘technicians of the cure’ who adopt culturally specific approaches that are effective in their own context and, significantly, don’t make “scientific” claims regarding universal authority as does psychoanalysis.

Gojfey goes on to point out that one consequence of Stengers’ argument regarding the therapeutic practices of  non-modern therapeutic ‘technicians of the cure’ is that it requires us to set aside any notion of their hierarchical subordination to science. A point that returns him to witches again, persons whose technique cannot be explained by science and so is, from a modern point of view, simply another artefact. However, if we refuse to ‘privilege episteme over techne, not only is artefactuality not necessarily a criticism, but the idea that there is something to be learned from the neo-pagans becomes a more credible claim – because a central element of what would otherwise allow what they do to be explained (away) is removed’ (p. xix).

Pignarre and Stengers, drawing on Guattari, consider  the techniques of non-violent protest and ritual used by contemporary witches as an effective form of ‘existential catalysis’. Stengers notes that: ‘to take the efficacy of a technique seriously imposes the need to understand it as being addressed to something more powerful than the technician’ and that for witches such as Starhawk this is the immanent Goddess who, in turn, becomes the ground for  cultivating ‘a sensibility and disposition to think and act’ otherwise (p.xx). For Pignarre and Stengers, then,  the artifices of witchcraft are a means to cultivate an active thinking that is not framed by the presuppositions of modernity and, as such, returns us to  the need to insist that alternatives to it are possible. Or, as Starhawk puts it: “Systems don’t change easily. Systems try to maintain themselves, and seek equilibrium. To change a system, you need to shake it up, disrupt the equilibrium. That often requires conflict. …To me, conflict is a deeply spiritual place. It’s the high-energy place where power meets power, where change and transformation can occur.”

It may be that the artists whose thinking and work make up Looking for a Sign: Contemporary Art, Magic and Language would be in agreement with this, although there s no evidence that any of them are aware of the arguments in Capitalist Sorcery: Breaking the Spell. All I can say is that I am more taken by the work of Crone Cast, a feminist art collective that explores the conditions of the pandemic, climate change, and societal and ecosystem collapse, and that reimagines the crone as noticed, seen, and heard so as to engage with ageing, power, identity, eccentricity and merging with the more-than-human as a process of becoming, in symbiosis with the precariousness of our times.

Images provided by Wanda Zyborska

Yesterday I drove up to this open studio event at studioMADE in Dinbych, North Wales, to meet up with the sculptor Lois Williams. I’ve been in contact with her – I’m writing about her work – for a while now and very much wanted to see what she’s currently making. I hope to post that writing here at some point soon – hopefully next month – so want to use this post to reflect on the context in which she was showing work.

I have been reading Prof. Justin O’Connor’s book Culture is not an Industry: Reclaiming art and culture for the common good (Manchester University Press, 2024) and my trip to Dinbych grounded what I’ve been reading in a very real example of why his argument is both important and urgent. Lois introduced me to the artists Angela Davies and Mark Eaglen, who originally established studioMADE on the first floor of the Carriageworks as a hybrid studio/gallery space back in 2015. Then, in the spring of 2022, they took on the tenancy of the main, downstairs, gallery space. Like so many artist/curators outside big towns and cities (and, of course, like some within those major urban spaces), they function at the margins of what is seen as significant by the funding arm of the culture industry yet serve as an active cultural interface between the community in which they live and work and a wide and diverse range of cultural activity. And, as they point out on their website, much of the work that they do is “self-funded and voluntary”. Which could been seen as meaning that it’s done using time and energy that goes against the grain of commitment to their creative work. However, as I gathered from talking to Angela and Mark, while there’s an element of truth in that, it’s not by any means the whole story.

As O’Connor reminds us: ‘culture is how we remember the past and imagine the future. It is part of how we become free individuals in a democratic society’ (p.228). It It is clear from our conversation that they are both alert to questions about both the metaphors made available by the past and present concerns about ecology and science relating to the future. While running studioMADE clearly takes a good deal of time and energy and generates all the inevitable worries about funding that dog all such enterprises, it also has real benefits for them.

I would summarise those benefits by putting down what might seem obvious but that, none the less, I feel needs restating. Places like studioMADE are ultimately sites of active conversation as much as of making, of the exchange of ideas, of the questioning, and sometimes validation, of the kind of knowing and gut intuition that, for an artist largely working alone, just doesn’t happen often enough. In short, they provide a particular kind of complex interface that animates and sustains a wide and diverse range of intellectual, emotional, and physical cultural life. They are also places where personal and “local” preoccupations can intersect with wider public concerns. (I am thinking here of Angela’s current preoccupation with bees). Places where elements of the personal and public, the local and international, can freely rub up against each other in unexpected and often creative ways. Such places are, in short, a point of animated convergence and intersection between multiple psychic and social ecologies – places that, in turn, have the possibility to inform and animate activity in the communities of which they are a part.

As O’Connor points out, the ‘funded aspect of the cultural infrastructure intersects in complex ways with the “overlooked” zone of small independent not-for-profit projects and spaces, volunteers and unpaid artists’ that, at a local level, sustain what he calls ‘culture’s soft infrastructure’, the ‘shared knowledge, traditions’, and ‘patterns of sociability’ (p. 183) vital to human social ecologies.

That managing such places has some real benefit for the artists who do that work shouldn’t blind us to the difficult practical issues involved. As O’Connor again reminds us, a ‘functioning cultural infrastructure requires money, skills, time and effort’, yet the orientation of economic power in the now-dominant world of culture as an industry is ‘to the highly extractive, and mostly non-locally owned, minority commercial sector for its exemplar and sign of success’ (pp.183-185). Anyone who doubts that claim should read Sarah Thornton’s 33 Artists in 3 Acts (Granta, 2014). Thornton’s interviews make all too clear that today’s examples of global artistic success, operate ‘on the basis of the ‘forces of the market in a capitalist society’ and know only too well that, today, ‘handling one’s market – making decisions about how much art to make and where to show it’ – is central to being a successful contemporary artist in a global art market (p.333).

I’m not going to start on a critique of the realpolitik of the art world and its deep, and officially unacknowledged, complicity not only with global capital but with the cultural of possessive individualism that underpins its extractive philosophy. It’s enough to remind ourselves that we need to rethink how we support spaces like the Carriageworks. Spaces that need to be seen, for reasons I’ve tried to indicated, not only as significant (if sadly often under-appreciated) community and educational resources but as focusing resistance to the cultural status quo that continues to add to our socio-environmental problems.

Some ways by which we might start to build that support come to mind. The first would be for their organisers to build alliances that help give a collective profile to such spaces, perhaps a federation of independent arts spaces. While there are always problems associated with building such alliances, they also provide a way to share knowledge and experience and some degree of lobbying power. I wonder whether it would be worth looking to an organisation like the Joseph Rowntree Foundation for support to build such a federation? Then there is the possibility of making common cause with other cultural initiatives that actively break with the culture industry mould in interesting and productive ways. An obvious choice in a Welsh context might be Utopias Bach (although, as someone involved in that collaborative, I have to admit a bias). Another, not unrelated initiative, this time in Ireland, would be the model of eco-education for people who, broadly speaking, work in the arts being delivered by Cathy Fitzgerald.

Finally, we might all help build such support by letting go of our mistaken belief in our possession of a monolithic, rather than relational, identity. As the feminist philosopher Geraldine Finn rightly insists, we are ‘always both more and less than the categories that name and divide us’ (Why Althusser killed His Wife: Essays on Discourse and Violence, 1996, p. 171), categories that include “artist”. A view shared, in another context, by the poet and immunologist Miroslav Holub who, when pondering our preoccupation with categories like “artist” and “scientist”, reminds us that, in actuality: ’95 per cent of our time we are really secretaries, telephonists, passers-by, carpenters, plumbers, privileged and underprivileged citizens, waiting patrons, applicants, household maids, clerks, commuters, offenders, listeners, drivers, runners, patients, losers, subjects and shadows?’ (The Dimensions of the Present Moment and other essays, Faber & Faber, 1990). The details of the list will, of course, vary for each of us but, if we’re honest, I think Holub’s point still holds. It was this insight, supported by those of the psychologist James Hillman in relation to the relational nature of the self, that underpins my chapter ‘Ensemble Practices’ for The Routledge Companion to Art in the Public Realm, edited by Cameron Cartiere and Leon (2021). As I argue there, we now need to detach our understanding of art from the culture industry’s model of competitive production and consumption and see it, instead, in terms of more inclusive and wide-ranging: ‘creative activity in which art acts to animate ensembles of heterogeneous skills and concerns, facilitating in turn processes of “mutual accompaniment” necessary to enact a geopolitics of the terrestrial. Ensembles that retain the psychic benefits of an engendering creativity but at a distance from the assumptions, expectations, and protocols central to a hyper-professionalised art world. Considering increasingly heterogeneous creative practices as compound ensembles is, I suggest, a step towards reversing the situation in which art serves to perpetuate the culture of possessive individualism, and with it the Great Derangement’ (p. 269).

Importantly, of course, that’s a step that each of us is able to make for ourselves.

In between sessions together, we’ve worked individually.
Mathilde has researched further scientific data and created thin sections in the lab at theUniversity of Bristol from rock samples from Doniford beach, as well as undertaking her own creative explorations with the paints and the data.

Sara has been testing the potential of the earth pigment paints, using a variety of surfaces, binders and processing techniques. She has been stretching her explorations of the materials into combinations with other media, including oil-based glaze medium and figuring out the aesthetic and conceptual needs and potential of these works through a range of improvisations.

Convergence | Creative Lab | update 01 (v4)

We document our joint and personal explorations through a shared sketchbook and an online diary. These records have proved invaluable to track our evolving thoughts about the methods, themes, and purpose of the collaboration. Much of the learning is experiential and in the moment, whether walking the terrain, working with the paints or cutting rocks in the lab, so it has been essential to capture it as it emerges and keep each other up-to-date.

Convergence | Creative Lab | update 01 (v4)

We took a decision to remain located in a single rural, coastal environment, rather than traversing across and through the landscape. This has enabled a settling of collected experiences and materials, and offered the potential for a deepened immersion into a geologically-rich location.

Starting with an inhalation of the experience of being on Doniford Beach, we absorbed visual, tactile, geological, multi-sensory, embodied understandings and insights of this complex and dynamic coastal terrain. Back in our studio and laboratory environments, a wealth of questions and avenues for exploration have emerged from handling, processing and interrogating earths, rocks, videos and other visual data gathered from the beach.

Universal and global themes around the value of art and science coming together, rather than a place-specific narrative are emerging. Our choice to focus on one rich place is becoming a locus for expanding into broader, more universal themes.

Some of the strands we are actively working with are:

●  Empathy vs disconnection
Comparing our approaches to data collection and observing the detachment from the natural environment felt in the science lab, in contrast to processing the earths in a mindful and connected way in the studio. Industrial cutting, grinding and polishing in the lab feels disturbing and violent, and emphasises the detachment. How do scientific methods contribute to the detachment we feel from our environment? And in contrast, how does an artistic approach to manipulating pigments and source material help retain connection? This emergent collaboration explores how this connected artistic approach can infuse into scientific practice.

●  Parallels between scientific and artistic processes and analysis Both Sara’s artistic approach in the studio (layering earth paints on 2D surfaces) and Mathilde’s process of making thin sections from rock (grinding them down until they are only 30 micrometres thick) are ways of making flat rocks. What is revealed in these flattening processes, discretely and together?

●  Aesthetics
Beauty (however defined) and its role and value in facilitating emotional connections recurs as a question, in particular when fostering a sense of relationship with a place. We explore both its function in art and its arguable absence in science.

●  Soft; hard; organic; geometric
Considering physical changes to rocks and earth through lab and studio processes, and natural and manmade alterations to the coast through erosion. We are questioning how these changes alter our relationship with the materiality of the natural environment.

●  Other themes arise from the process of making such as the concept of migratory stones, as parallels with other forms of migration, and our ‘becoming one’ with, rather than observing the landscape. These are emergent themes which we want to delve into and further.

Where we’re headed next

We are fascinated by the ways in which the micro and macro forms and dimensions of the environment echo one another and how, along with the strands of inquiry above, they give rise to meta-questioning. The act of working together directly is eliciting new questions and the materials and matter of the place are contributing an additional participant to our work – becoming a third-party in our collaboration. The strands identified above all contribute to refining our collaborative purpose, methods, concepts, activities and outcomes.

We aim to share our works-in-process at an exhibition in September. We anticipate that we will present works which combine raw scientific data and visual storytelling with a strong sense of the materiality of our coastal encounters.

This presentation will be a snapshot. We will continue to develop the works into the autumn, in greater depth. As the artworks near completion, we also envisage a phase of sharing, dialogue, reflection and evaluation of the whole process to refine our collaborative methodology. We would like to document the learnings from our research and share them with others. We anticipate also having a film which documents our evolving process and interprets our emerging collaboration.

We hope ultimately to create a model of deep and purposeful art-science collaboration to share with artistic and scientific research communities.

In a chapter by Maria Kind called ‘Returning on Bikes: Notes on Social Practice’, she reminds us of something that should hopefully be obvious, namely that: ‘… not all social practice projects are interesting and relevant, just as all painting is not uninteresting and irrelevant’ (in Living As Form: Socially-engaged Art from 1991-2011, ed. Nato Thompson, Creative Time Books, 2012).

Convergence / Creative Lab. is a project being developed by geologist Mathilde Braddock and painter Sara Dudman; one that straddles the type of divide within art world thinking implicit in Kind’s observation. Essentially it’s a material “conversation” between the two women with very different disciplinary backgrounds and sets out to address a number of significant issues: creative, environmental and intellectual. A conversation that I have been privileged to join at a couple of points and hope to continue to do so.

Not the least of the questions this conversation raises is that of the vexed cultural relationship between “art” and “science”. Or, as I have suggested may be a more appropriate designation, between the often highly dogmatic mentalities of aestheticism and scientism. Mentalities based on presuppositions unthinkingly built into specialist disciplinary “languages” and transmitted via the ways those “languages” are used to make claims about how the world is known and understand.

In the remainder of this and the next post I have reconstructed Braddock and Dudman’s first ‘update’ on their work-in-progress. I’ve done so because I believe they are engaged in a project that intends to do something rather different from usual art/science collaborations. These tend to be based on assumptions grounded in deeply unequal “authority” positions. As a result, they tend to produce work that merely illustrates or, as one artist has memorably put it, “sexes-up” scientific work data. Data that would otherwise only be of interest to a specialist scientific audience. In short, that supposedly “popularise” science by refiguring it in a largely spurious “artistic” form’. This project, in contrast, is set to take a very different, and much more genuinely collaborative, approach; one that does not take for granted what so many other art / science projects tend to do.

My hope is that, as this project develops, I will be able to report on its discoveries.

[N.B. All images in this and the following post are copyright of Sara Dudman and Mathilde Braddock].

Can a collaborative art and science interpretation of the geology of a place bring us into deepened connection with the Earth?

This is the question at the core of our Convergence | Creative Lab which brings us – Mathilde Braddock and Sara Dudman – together to explore how a geologist and an artist interpret the landscape, what a deeper collaboration between these disciplines might look like, and define its value by testing its potential and limits.

Over the last six months, we have been combining art and science and the intergenerational perspectives of two women to blur the boundaries and explore our convergent and divergent approaches to interpreting the land and landscape. We have infused and disrupted our own and each other’s practice. We have spent time learning from and about a place, with care and attention for the planet, each other and ourselves as a central principle in all aspects of our work.

We are in the thick of exploring the potential of this collaboration, but some of the themes that are emerging include:

• Empathy versus disconnection
• “Flat rocks” – the parallels between our artistic and scientific approaches
• The role of aesthetics and beauty
• The contrasts of soft/hard, organic/geometric shapes and processes

Our exploration so far
We kept our methodology open and fluid to enable us to follow research strands that felt most relevant and rich. We have been walking, sitting and spending time immersed in the landscape of the West Somerset coast, foraging for pigments, stories, data, visual and sensory resources.

We also spend time immersed in each other’s professional worlds.

Our exploration so far
We kept our methodology open and fluid to enable us to follow research strands that feltmost relevant and rich. We have been walking, sitting and spending time immersed in the landscape of the West Somerset coast, foraging for pigments, stories, data, visual and sensory resources.

We also spend time immersed in each other’s professional worlds.
in the lab at the University of Bristol pouring over papers, maps and microscope imagery:

and in Sara’s studio processing the earth pigments and exploring the visual information, earth samples and other resources gathered from our site visits:

Taking as his starting-point the dead girl in Rain Johnson’s 2005 film Brick and the subjects of any number of Victorian paintings – from Ophelia and Arthurian maidens through to G. F. Watt’s Found Drowned – Burnside suggests that such figures are best seen as allegories for a male ‘soul-self’ that is seen as a girl ‘because a seeming girlishness’ is what boys appear ‘to give up in order to be a man’.  Like much of the book in which this appears – I Put a Spell on You: Several Digressions on Love and Glamour – what Burnside has to say in On Lost Girl Syndrome is not about the lost girl at all, or not in any literal sense, but about the problem boys have growing into full manhood in a patriarchal society. Burnside’s preoccupation with this was already present in 1988, the year The Hoop, his first volume of poems, was published. There, in the poem Psyche-Life, he speculates that ‘the soul’ may be a woman or, perhaps, a ‘dialect … of a common tongue’. A poem then that can be read as a prelude to On Lost Girl Syndrome.

My attraction to what Burnside is exploring registered a while back, although I  did not really understand it. It appeared in connection with the image of the young Greek girls who, dedicated to Artemis, were called “little bears”. They took part in a ritual dance that’s described by Paula Meehan in one of the lectures in her Imaginary Bonnets with Real Bees in Them (2016). I first came across this years back in a short essay by the cultural anthropologist Károly Kerény dedicated to his nine-year-old daughter and called A mythological Image of Girlhood. At the it caught my attention as something psychically resonant, but nothing more.

Then, back on October 24^th, 2022, I posted the last of Twenty-two Postcards for Utopias Bach on this blog. There I wrote that a momentary sighting in Alston had:

‘answered my question about the “grounding” of all Artemis stands for. A willowy tomboy in cut-off jeans and sweatshirt, maybe eight or ten, appeared from the back of a beaten-up old Landrover. She radiated an absolute self-possession that seemed all of a piece with her make-shift bow – a flexed wand of wood bent taut by its string – that was slung across her shoulder. She then half strode, half danced towards the Co-Op, followed at a respectful distance by her father and younger brother. All three disappeared inside and I saw no more of them’. 

That sighting might best be described as giving me an elusive sense of another way of being, of an as yet “untamed”, intimate knowing of the world. One that I believe is related to what is called in Irish an saol eile (literally “the other life”). It’s this quality that, for me, links the epiphany of that sighting to John Burnside’s chapter.

The images below relate in various ways to these thoughts.

I am fascinated by the possibilities of artist’s books. I’ve made a few and at one stage set up a little publishing enterprise called Wild Conversations Press. (It faded away because I have no business sense whatsoever). More recently, I’ve used this website to “publish” what I would once have turned into some form of artist’s book. Although doing this is simpler than paper-based publishing, costs readers nothing, and is almost certainly better for the environment, I do miss the physical qualities of a book I can hold in my hands.

A while back I read the American poet and environmental writer Barbara Hurd’s Listening to the Savage: River Notes and Half-Heard Melodies (2016) and was intrigued by her including short phrases she had heard her granddaughter Samantha say. They sounded like lines from poems. Two summers ago, re-reading the book, I noted down some of those phrases and then used them as a starting point for making a series of small images, most of which were not finished until this summer and some of which have been abandoned. Here are some that I’ve kept.

I ended the first part of this piece by summarising my argument in terms of needing to better understand, and then to resist, the “Strict Father’ framing mentality in connection with silly generalisations that distort the complexities of necessary debate. I then suggested that engaging with poetry may be one way to help ourselves do that. Here I want to take up that notion.

Back in 1995 Simon Schama reminded his readers that: ‘to take the many and several ills of the environment seriously does not … require that we trade in our cultural legacy or its posterity’ (1995: p.18). Consequently I’ll start with a relevant aspect of that cultural legacy, the standard claim made against poetry by political activists: namely that it changes nothing. Those making this claim often support it by referencing the second section of W.H. Auden’s poem In Memory of W. B. Yeats (d. Jan. 1939),which includes the line: ‘… poetry makes nothing happen…’ (An argument that ignores what Auden wrote in the poem that follows it – In Memory of Ernst Toller (d. May 1939) – which is that: ‘We are lived by powers we pretend to understand’. But that, I think, is perhaps a separate issue).

In Imaginary Bonnets with Real Bees in Them (2016)Paula Meehan, a poet deeply concerned about both environmental and social issues, takes up what is said ‘about the failure of poets in the face of politics’. She argues that if, as Auden claims, ‘poetry makes nothing happen, maybe it stops something happening, stops time, takes our breath away…Maybe it’s like the negative space in a painting by which what is there is revealed, to be apprehended by human consciousness’ (p.19). I fear that increasing our capacity for wonder in the face of what is, however, is not going to cut much ice with those for whom only the actions about which they are passionate, only literally “making something happen”, counts as worthwhile.  

Another poet, John Burnside, who was also passionately concerned with environmental issues, takes up the question of Auden’s claim in rather more detail. In The Music of Time: Poetry in the Twentieth Century (2021) he points out that those in the English-speaking world who are happiest with seeing poetry as ‘marginal and ineffective’ dismiss it on the basis of ‘a fundamental misunderstanding of how poetry actually works, both on the individual imagination and in the social sphere’ (pp. 18-19). Burnside pointing out just how naïve it is to think that a poem, or a whole life-time writing poetry, could ‘change the world’. Rather, he insists, what poetry actually ‘does, first, is to survive… actively, on its own terms’. It is, he goes on to claim, ‘a way of being, a provider of context, an independent, non-oppositional, entirely autonomous state’. However, by that he does not mean that it has no communal role. Rather he sees it as a discipline, for both writer and reader; one that heightens attention to the world. He goes on: ‘This act of paying due attention is in itself a political act, for it enhances both our appreciative and our critical abilities, which are key to defining a position in a societal sphere in which both these faculties are currently at risk’ (pp.23-25). It’s at this point that I think his argument both aligns with Rebecca Solnit’s musings on the Left’s reaction against aesthetics and throws light on what I suspect is Monbiot’s real motive for making his silly claim about poetry.

It’s also the case, as Burnside goes on to point out, that what he argues about poetry applies equally to the literature and the humanities as ways of resisting what Jonathan Franzen calls ‘cultural totalitarianism’. I would want to add the visual arts to his list, although it’s of course often difficult to maintain his argument in relation to the visual; arts in the face of their increasing commercialisation and trivialisation by the pressures exerted by the “culture industry” and its various State-funded instruments. An industry hell-bent on merging the more “popular” aspects of the arts with commercial entertainment, while maintaining the supposedly “high” or “difficult” arts as fodder for forms of conspicuous consumption and elite posturing (much like “high” fashion). A world documented, if one’s willing to do some reading between the lines, in a book like Sarah Thornton’s 33 Artists in 3 Acts (2014). But all this leads into another whole line of thought, one that I’m not comfortable tackling but that, if I can get through and digest Justin O’Connor’s Culture Is Not An Industry: reclaiming art and culture for the common good (2024), I may feel obliged to return to.                            

Sometimes it’s a small thing that snags my attention and, like a thorn caught under the skin, it then has to be slowly worked out into the light of day.

Caroline Lucas begins the sixth chapter of Another England: How to Reclaim Our National Story (2024), entitled ‘English Nature’, by quoting George Monbiot’s pronouncement, in Regenesis (2022)that: ‘One of the greatest threats to life on Earth is poetry’. For any number of reasons, not least because reading poetry helped me get through lockdown and because I choose to coordinate a small poetry-reading group that includes people who write poetry, that pronouncement struck me first as really silly and then as actually potentially dangerous.

One way of introducing what I want to set out in this essay is to suggest a major problem we now face is precisely the use of this type of silly, unqualified, “click-bait” generalisation, a habit that trivialises and so can seriously distort, very necessary debates about important issues, including about environmental issues that may well turn out to be matters of life and death.

I understand that, as a campaigning newspaper journalist who must produce regular copy, Monbiot needs to cultivate habits that enable him to hold the attention of readers and that one way of doing that, given his pitch, is to keep identifying and condemning new “greatest threats to life on Earth”. It was not unreasonable that, after Lula’s victory in the 2022 Brazilian presidential election, for example, he should have tweeted: “Bolsonaro was a threat not only to the lives of Brazilians, but to life on Earth.” I certainly wouldn’t quarrel with the basic sentiment behind that statement. However, as a particular individual politician Bolsonaro was one of a number of self-serving right-wing demagogues like Donald Trump and Nigel Farage; individuals who gain power and/or influence by divisively capitalising on people’s fears, prejudices and unreal desires. “Poetry”, on the other hand, is not of any one particular type, orientation, or set of qualities, not least because it’s been part of human expression across much of the world for several thousand years. (The first poems we know about, written by a woman named Enheduana who lived in what is now called Iraq around 2300 BCE, depict, for example, a world frighteningly subject to change, conflict, chaos, and contradiction beyond human control).

For Monbiot to make such a silly blanket generalisation about poetry, and for Lucas to repeat it, seems to me indicative of something more than just the use of a lazily provocative generalisation. What worries me is that, as a rhetorical habit, these are a milder variation on the kinds of generalised provocations used by Bolsonaro, Trump, Farage, and their kind. The same kind of generalisation, in the last analysis, as Trump’s absurd claim that all Mexicans are: “drug dealers, criminals, and rapists”.  

To be fair to Lucas, she doesn’t simply take Monbiot’s claim as given. She goes on to modify its sentiment so as to criticise what she sees as the effect of the ‘strong elegiac theme running through much of the literature of the English countryside, a mood of loss, mourning what has gone instead of fighting to protect what is left’ (p. 154). Again, I can’t really quarrel with the sentiment behind that view. However, the index of Lucas’ book lists ten references to the nineteenth-century poet John Clare, whose work she claims to admire as reflecting the insights of an ‘agricultural labourer with an intimate knowledge of the realities of rural life’ (p. 129). So how does she square her admiration for the poetry of John Clare with Monbiot’s characterisation of poetry as “one of the greatest threats to life on Earth”? I don’t believe she can, in which case it’s plain silly to use that click-bait quotation.

In an interview with Monbiot in Green European Journal , December 2022 the interviewer raises Monbiot’s generalisation about poetry: ‘you mean that our societies are clinging to a “ridiculous fantasy” of country life [which I presume is a phrase quoted from Monbiot], including the beauties of sheep and cattle herding’. To which Monbiot responds: ‘We have a real problem here that our perception of food policy is very dominated by aesthetics, by poetry, by pictures’. I don’t doubt that many people in the UK have a misplaced perception of the countryside, in no small part the result of a host of complicated historical and cultural factors. These include the war-time propaganda based on an ideal English rurality absorbed by my grandparents’ and parents’ generation, the way literature is traditionally taught in British schools, children’s books and, yes, the aesthetics of photographs, paintings, films, television, and advertising. But to simply dismiss the resulting perceptions as a “ridiculous fantasy” seems to me, at best, wildly patronising and, at worst and in terms of the psychosocial changes we urgently need to make, not just unhelpful but profoundly counter-productive. One question this begs, however, is just who do Monbiot and Lucas take to be their readers?

I suppose, as a lifetime member of the Green Party, I am one type of person they can reasonably expect to read what they write. My commitment to the Greens means that I understand and support both a good many of the changes they call for and, as it happens, share Lucas’ distrust of traditional elegiac pastoral themes. But that doesn’t mean I’m ready to accept silly, and ultimately dangerous, blanket generalisations. And I very much doubt I’m alone in this.

My view of Monbiot’s claim that “we” (?) have a serious problem in that “our” ‘perception of food policy’ is ‘dominated by aesthetics, by poetry, by pictures’, is that it’s underlying reductivism and negativity is informed by an attitude what Rebecca Solnit long ago identified in As Eve Said To The Serpent: On Landscape, Gender, and Art (2001). It’s a book I constantly return to because, as its title suggests (and like her earlier Savage Dreams: A Journey into the Hidden Wars of the American West), her understanding of issues of land and environment is firmly intersectional and inclusive. It’s for that reason that it includes her thoughts on why traditional Leftist thinking often has trouble with aesthetics including, that is, both poetry and beauty. 

Solnit argues that Western culture has had a problem with beauty ever since: ‘Thomas Aquinas disposed of it by asserting that the beautiful was the same as the good, which meant that it had no extramoral, no autonomous power at all’. This view was reinforced by the medieval notion that beauty ‘is mutable and therefore false’ (p. 83). These medieval notions connect in a number of ways to Monbiot‘s generalisation about poetry. One is suggested by Solnit’s understanding that those on ‘the Left would like to deny beauty as a motivating force altogether’ because they want to ‘deny the power of form and embrace content alone – as though the two were separable’. Like medieval moralists, many on the traditional Left seem to link formal beauty in the arts ‘with a corrupt seductiveness’ that might gain ‘power over us rather than we over it’. And here she goes on to identify what I take to be a fundamental issue. Many on the traditional Left enlist science and reason against what they see as the reactionary, emotional, irrationalism of Right-wing demagogies. They want not only ‘to reside in the rational space of the head’, but to weaponise an authoritarian view of reason itself. That inevitably opens them up to the implicit fear that to ‘be seduced’ by art ‘is to be reminded that there are things stronger than reason, than agenda’. A fear that haunts those on the Left animated by a vision of power where ‘authority is the desire to have the last word, to close the conversation’ (pp. 83-84). It’s on this basis that I think we should understand Monbiot’s hostility to poetry. That hostility would then be, at root, a fearful response to the fact that aesthetics, poetry, pictures, etc. have the power, in Solnit’s words, to keep the conversation open, to encourage us, where necessary, to ‘start all over again and again’ (p. 84). Poetry can be, in short, a challenge to the notion of “scientific” reason as a guarantee of authority.                

Monbiot claims to have read over 5,000 scientific papers before writing Regenesis. I can’t help thinking it’s a pity he’s not also read more widely. For example, Simon Schama’s Landscape and Memory (1995) might have helped him understand something of the historical complexities and paradoxes that inevitably underpin environmental debates. It might even have helped him to have read more widely in the scientific literature. Of particular relevance here would be the work of the cognitive scientist and linguist George Lakoff. Lakoff is author of More than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor (1989) – written with Mark Turner ‘in the service of helping the study of poetry function to promote ethical, social and personal awareness’ (p. 214); The Political Mind (2008), which explores how underlying “framings” influence political debate, and the paper ‘Why it Matters How We Frame the Environment’ (2010). Unlike Monbiot Lakoff, a Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science at the University of California, understands that poets are craftspeople who ‘use basically the same tools we use’ when we speak or write, in particular in their use of metaphor as a form of thought that is ‘indispensable not only to our imagination but also to our reason’. He argues that poets, by using ‘capacities we all share’, are able to ‘illuminate our experience, explore the consequences of our beliefs, challenge the ways we think, and criticise our ideologies’ (1989: p. xi). The value of Lakoff’s work to a journalist or politician turned author would be, at the very least, that it demonstrate why progressive political arguments based on “objective”, “scientific” reasoning are simply not sufficient to change peoples’ minds. But I suspect, having read Lakoff, that Monbiot is too wedded to his belief in the absolute, “scientific” rightness of his own standpoint to genuinely listen to anyone who would challenge or critique his views.

I won’t attempt to summarise the many-stranded argument of The Political Mind here. What I can say is that my concern about Monbiot’s underlying attitude is that while he argues for what he sees as environmentally-sound social and political actions, he all-too-often does so using a rhetoric framed by what Lakoff calls the values of ‘The Strict Father Model’. There’s often nothing wrong, other than his over-emphatic emphasis, with the scientific content of Monbiot’s writing. My problem with it is that his rhetorical assumption of moral righteousness and unwavering belief in his own ability to identify the real sources of evil – anything from Welsh sheep to all the other “greatest threats to life on Earth” he’s named over the years. Underlying assumptions and a self-belief that belong to a mindset grounded in a strict, patriarchal, religious morality that can easily shade into totalitarianism.

As Simon Schama reminds us, writing about the management of woodland under the Third Reich, it’s ‘painful to acknowledge how ecologically conscientious’, and how heavily committed to conservation of the natural environment more generally, the Nazi regime actually was (p. 119). My point being that an absolute commitment to radical Green values is not incompatible with a totalitarian mentality. As Schama points out, the militant wing of Green politics struggles with ‘the normal processes of representative democracy’ because it sees its cause as ‘a revolutionary contestation with bourgeois capitalism for the fate of the earth’ and, in consequence, craves ‘the authority to impose salutary solutions’ for what it presents, not unreasonably as ‘a crisis of paramount importance’ (p. 119). My concern is that, if we care about the fate of the earth and are to find some way to address the “wicked problems” we now face, we will need to find ways of arguing our case that avoids a tacit endorsement of authoritarian attitudes, the greenwash of bourgeois capitalism, and the blind denial of environmental realities adopted by Right-wing demagogues.

To do that we’ll need to be clear that the strict, ultimately authoritarian, paternalism that in different ways frames both radical authoritarianism and right-wing demagogy is best contested by fostering a progressive Green ‘politics of empathy’ predicated on ‘protection, empowerment, and community’ (Lakoff, 2008: p.81). Lakoff argues that narratives ‘are brain structures that we can live out, recognise in others, and imagine, because the same brain structures are used for all three kinds of experience’ (p.93). If an individual or group constructs a self-identity based on internalising the Strict Father Model, he or they are unlikely to listen to, or empathise with, the narratives that are of vital importance to others because, like the Strict Father, they will be convinced that they know best. The result is then likely to be first withdrawal from debate and, ultimately, violent confrontation.

In Monbiot’s case, his insistence that he can and must argue so as to ‘close the conversation’ is underpinned by his belief that his arguments contain the scientific content makes his case incontestable. What this insistence has meant is that, when he tries to put his ideas into practice in contexts where others frame the values of landscape and memory differently, things inevitably go wrong. This happened with his attempts to substantially “re-wild” the Welsh uplands. (See my posts on this blog from 08.03 2022). The problem of a rhetoric based in an unacknowledged “Strict Father” framing, and in particular its implications for any hope of achieving real change, are at the heart of what lies behind my concern about Monbiot’s silly generalisation about poetry.

Of course I fully acknowledge that, for Monbiot and for those Greens for whom he can do no wrong, all this will be an irrelevance, a distraction from winning the argument set out in Regenesis. That being the case, it’s important to add that none of what I have written above means that I dispute the broader trajectory of that argument – namely that we need to radically change how our food is produced. Rather, my concern is that Monbiot’s argument is undermined by underlying assumptions about himself and others, including his contempt for those whose view of country life he dismisses as a “ridiculous fantasy”. That it’s possible to propose alternative routes towards similar ends to Monbiot’s, but without evoking contempt for the historical situation of ordinary people or their attitudes, is suggested by a book like Colin Tudge’s Six Steps Back to the Land (2016).

In short, my argument here boils down to our needing to better understand, and then to resist, evocations of the “Strict Father’ framing mentality, whether we encounter them in the generalisations of a “man of the Left” like Monbiot or of the Right-wing demagogies he quite rightly criticises. Engaging with poetry is, in my view, just one way in which we can help ourselves do both those things. The “how and why” of that claim is the subject of the second part of this essay.