Ashden Directory

New metaphors for sustainability: the Spanish Dehesa

December 20, 2011Ashden DirectoryAcorn, African Savannah, Bio Diversity, Dehesa, Duende, Eco System, Grus Grus, Husbandry, Iberian Pigs, Maximum Exploitation, Metaphors, Nature Conservation, Oak Trees, Pastoral System, Pastureland, Rare Butterflies, Southwest Spain, Square Kilometres, Turnbull, Western Europe

This post comes to you from Ashden Directory

Our series on new metaphors for sustainability continues with Alison Turnbull‘s ‘Spanish Dehesa’, a sylvopastoral system that marries production and nature conservation. Â Alison was born in BogotÃ , lives in London and exhibits her artwork there. Â

I first saw the Spanish dehesaon a trip to Extremadura some twenty years ago. We drove for over fifty miles without passing another car and the temperature soared to 53Âº C. It was difficult to believe we were in Western Europe and not in the plains of the American west or crossing an African savannah.Â Iâ€™ve been back every year since, walking and experiencing this unique eco-system in all kinds of weather, under all sorts of light.

Rather like the evocative Spanish term duende, used in the performing arts to mean â€˜soulâ€™ or â€˜spiritâ€™, dehesa is a difficult word to translate. Meadow, wooded pastureland and grazing operation, it is a sylvo-pastoral system that covers 20,000 square kilometres, mostly in southwest Spain but also stretching into Portugal and Morocco. It is one of the oldest created landscapes in Europe â€“ a cultural landscape if you like – just how ancient no one quite knows, but certainly several centuries, and it remains an outstanding example of intelligent husbandry.Â It is beneficial to the needs of human beings but also hospitable to a whole variety of other creatures, including many rare butterflies.

The grassed zones in between the oak trees are famously home to acorn-fed Iberian pigs that produce the most wonderful ham in the world. Honey, cheese, cork and charcoal are all products of the dehesa. It is an area of exceptional bio-diversity – for instance it is the wintering ground for most of Europeâ€™s population of Grus grus, the common crane.

The dehesais special in that it is an area where maximum exploitation sits side by side with maximum conservation. Itâ€™s man-made and itâ€™s right here in Europe.

New metaphors for sustainability: a stranger’s compass

December 18, 2011Ashden DirectoryCo Editor, Compass, Coordinates, Cumbrian, Decisions, Geology, Granite Face, Guidance System, Improvisation, Landscape, Left Behind, Magnetic North, Metaphor, Metaphors, Mud, Orientations, Safe Passage, sustainability, Walking With A Stranger, Wit

This post comes to you from Ashden Directory

Our co-editor Wallace Heim continues our series of new metaphors for sustainability with a guidance system that changes hands.Â

Walking an unfamiliar Cumbrian fell with a compass, often without a map, links me to the land in a special way. The invisible, magnetic north that spins into place on the device is often perplexing and counter-intuitive. However reassuring it is to know there are vast forces of geology beyond any I can see, forces that co-ordinate my safe passage, I still have to negotiate the land right in front of me: that granite face, that swamped mire, that fast river. There is no picture in which to find myself, only wit, the land and the pull of a distant polar force.

A few times, I’ve come across a dropped compass. There’s a moment when clearing the mud from its face when I wonder whether it was left behind because it was broken, or not believed. Is the north that was found in a stranger’s hand the same as in mine?

I don’t think sustainability can be likened directly to a compass, as if there was a pole of certainty to it. There are orientations that guide, but they fluctuate with a landscape that is continually shifting. The incremental decisions made in response to immediate conditions themselves change the situation, alter what is possible to do. I see sustainability as a response to change, one that keeps alive the capacity to respond to further change. What kind of compass would show this light-footed improvisation that makes sure those in the future can navigate their own way?

Walking with a stranger’s compass comes closer as a metaphor. The compass is given, handed over, and it connects me to those I will never know, while helping me cross the land that I am in. The instruction is not reliable; maybe not safe. Or maybe it is, and the coordinates are sharper than on my own compass,Â signalling a clearer route. Is it pulling me in a direction I couldn’t have imagined? This uncertain magnetism invigorates the walk.Â One day, I’ll leave my compass behind.

New on our news page

December 13, 2011Ashden DirectoryAdebayo, African Odyssey, Arcola, Bookshops, Brendon, Changing Climate, Climate Change, Closer To Home, David Abram, David Rothenberg, Edinburgh Festival, Features Interviews, Forest Canopies, Home Culture, Interviews News, Public Art, Robert Butler, S Green, Six Ways, Social Values, Twitter

This post comes to you from Ashden Directory

In Nottingham, there’s a three-day celebration of the apple.In Edinburgh, David Abram, author of TheÂ Spell of the Sensuous, and Being Animal: An Earthy Cosmology,Â Â gives a public talk.

In London, Arcola’s Green Sundays return with a focus on recycling and upcycling.

In the bookshops, David Rothenberg’s Survival of the Beautiful investigates why nature is beautiful and how it has influenced science,Â Brendon Larson explores how metaphors entangle scientific facts with social values and Mojisola Adebayo’s Plays One includes ‘Moj of the Antarctic: An African Odyssey’.

There’s a new funding stream for public art by Creative Scotland, and a call for runners to participate in NVA’s Speed of Light at the Edinburgh Festival.

On the international scene, Conversation between TreesÂ uses sensors and mobile phones in the forest canopies in Brazil and the UK to communicate the light andÂ colour of the trees and the changing climate around them.

Closer to home, Culture and Climate Change: RecordingsÂ is available as an online pdf and publication.

New metaphors for sustainability: the Fetch (of a wavelength; to collect)

December 4, 2011Ashden DirectoryCape Farewell, Cattrell, Earth Systems, Island Technology, Islands Expedition, Land Mass, Living And Working In London, Orkney, Orkneys, Power And Energy, Primo Levi, Renewable Energies, Research Fellow, Royal College Of Art, Scottish Islands, Stromness, Territorial Boundaries, Twitter, Visual Artist, Working In London

This post comes to you from Ashden Directory

Our series of new metaphors for sustainability continues with Annie Cattrell’s two meaningsÂ for ‘Fetch’.Â A visual artist, born in Glasgow, living and working in London, Annie is a tutor at the Royal College of Art and a senior research fellow in Fine Art at DeMontfort University. She was onÂ the 2011 Cape Farewell Scottish Islands Expedition.

I was first introduced to the oceanographic term the â€˜Fetchâ€™ while visiting I.C.I.T (International Centre for Island Technology) on Orkney during a residency I undertook hosted by the Pier Arts Centre in Stromness during 2010.

The Fetch (length) of a wave can be incredibly long. For example, it could stretch from the east coast of the United States, where it might originate, and travel uninterrupted by land mass across the Atlantic Ocean, arriving on the shores of the west coast of Scotland, in particular the Orkneys, where it would then be forced to break against the coastline.

The simple equation relating to this phenomena is that the length of a wave determines the power and energy of it.

As a consequence scientists and technologists based in Orkney are trying to harness the waves to create renewable energies for the future.

The uninterrupted â€˜Fetchâ€™ length of a wave seems like a strong natural metaphor for cause and effect. The behaviour of oceans, seas and weather generally would appear to override any political or territorial boundaries and constraints, reminding us of the larger rhythms of earth systems that can so easily be damaged and altered by different types of human made pollutants.

‘Fetch’ can also mean to go and collect and is to some extent predictive and about a future intention. Collecting and harnessing ideas and ways of living more sustainably would seem to be navigating in the right direction!

If not now, when?, Primo Levi

New metaphors for sustainability: the soil in my family’s garden in Yorkshire

December 1, 2011Ashden DirectoryCallouses, Chrysanthemums, Detritus, Directory David, Fecundity, Generation To Generation, Grey Brown, Harradine, Heart Of The Matter, Inner London, Kitchen Waste, Leyton, London Plane, Market Gardener, Mineral Structure, Performance Installation, Photo David, Plane Trees, Small Of My Back, Spring Onions, Tomato Plants

photo: David's hands, his grandfather's rake, Hackney soil

This post comes to you from Ashden Directory

David Harradine is an artist working across performance, installation, publication and film, and is Artistic Director of Fevered Sleep. His metaphor for sustainability conveys his love for the transformations of soil.

We donâ€™t even know what to call it, whether itâ€™s soil or earth or dirt. ‘Earthy’ seems nourishing, homely, but we generally donâ€™t like things that are dirty or soiled. Dirty implies sex, which is getting to the heart of the matter: productiveness, creation, fecundity.

I keep an allotment in Hackney, inner London. For seven years Iâ€™ve been digging kitchen waste into the ground, applying horse shit gathered on Leyton Marsh, and bagging up leaves from the London Plane trees by the childrenâ€™s playground, waiting for them to break down into humus (brown nectar, nourishment, life). This soil, heavy London clay, grey brown, full of pebbles: this is sustainability. Itâ€™s what sustains me.

Everything I know about gardening â€“ a knowledge that resides in my fingernails, the callouses on my palms, the ache in the small of my back, the blunt edge of my spade, and the dirty Tupperware box in which I keep my seeds â€“ I learned in a garden in Yorkshire when I was a child. My grandfather was a market gardener. We grew gladioli, tomatoes, chrysanthemums, dahlia, potatoes and the spring onions for the market in Leeds. I remember one afternoon, my fingers stinking of tomato plants, when I asked him if one day the garden would be mine. I could not imagine how the life could continue without it. The very idea of family took root in that garden, with our hands and spades in that dark, scented, sensual soil; knowledge sown like seeds from generation to generation.

Soil: mineral structure fleshed out with the detritus of life and death. Wondrous recycler. Transformer of things into other things. As a child, it was unfathomable and miraculous to see the yellow-white flower of a double-headed chrysanthemum be created from heavy black soil.

Working my allotment in Hackney, I pull on the rake I brought from my grandfatherâ€™s garden. I have started to plan what I will do when my parents die, when that garden may no longer be ours. I think I will sack up some soil and bring it to London, because it carries time in it, and memory in it, and it carries my family in it, and I was grown in it. And I am sustained, here in the city, by the memory of the texture of it and the smell of it. And by the life, the life, the life that turns on an infinite cycle in the hidden dark depths of it.

New metaphors for sustainability: why we started

November 18, 2011Ashden DirectoryAnomaly, Associate Editor, Climate Change, Definitions, Dissent, Everyday Life, Expression, Features Interviews, Flowers, Interviews News, Metaphor, Metaphorically, Metaphors, Paradoxes, People, Reflection, Robert Butler, Six Ways, sustainability, Timeline, Twitter

This post comes to you from Ashden Directory

Wallace Heim writes:

We began thinking about metaphor and sustainability when we noticed that there weren’t any strong or imaginative metaphors for the concept, or ones that we could easily use in conversation. Metaphors are pervasive in human thought and communication. ‘Sustainability’ stood out as an anomaly, a common concept with many definitions, but no metaphors.

So in April, we asked four people to suggest a metaphor and we filmed their responses. We weren’t looking for ‘the’ metaphor. We were experimenting to see whether it was possible to think metaphorically about sustainability, in all its promise, its limitations and paradoxes.

Since then, we’ve added 14 more metaphors, (18 if you count everyone in the Institute for the Art and Practice of Dissent at Home), and will add another 6 through November and December, here on Ashdenizen and collected on the Directory.

Too, we’ll be posting comments on the project itself, which for some contributors was challenging; for others, playful; and for others, a delicate expression of meaning taken from their everyday life.

New metaphors for sustainability: the yew tree

November 15, 2011Ashden DirectoryAware That Everything, Canopy, Co Founder, Conwy Wales, Definition Of Sustainability, Early Bronze Age, Growth Trees, Immortality, Land Of Shadows, Llangernyw, Metaphors, Natural Sanctuaries, Occurrence, Organic Aspects, Peter Harrison, Solace, Timeless Quality, Yew Tree, Yew Trees, Yews

This post comes to you from Ashden Directory

the Llangernyw Yew, Conwy, Wales

Our series of new metaphors for sustainability will continue through November. Today, Peter Harrison, writer, artist and co-founder of Propeller Arts CollectiveÂ findsÂ solace in the shade of the yew tree.

A simple definition of sustainability is the capacity to sustain. For me, this immediately poses a problem. Iâ€™m aware that everything comes to an end, nothing can go on forever. Thereâ€™s something not quite real about the word, implying the possibility of being liberated from death. But also there are nurturing, practical, organic aspects to the word, implying maintenance and growth.

Trees are living processes. Yew trees live for centuries. Although it is difficult to accurately date yew trees, it is estimated that the Llangernyw Yew, in Conwy, Wales, is over four thousand years old. Yews are associated with immortality, renewal and transformation. Yews are living entities that sustain while the world around them changes. The yew in Conwy sheltered people from the early Bronze age. It is tempting to think that one of those people stood under the tree imagining life four thousand years in the future. As generations came and went, the tree continued. Yews represent the passage from life to death, and beyond, into the land of shadows.

The timeless quality of yew trees can also be personally experienced. Stepping into the low-hanging canopy of a yew, there is a marked change in temperature and volume. The air is cool and still. The world is quieter. A space under branches. Natural sanctuaries in which to reflect, to slow down and contemplate life beyond the moment.

This is an uncertain world. In past centuries, when death was a more present, daily occurrence than it is now, maybe yews gave people hope that the world will continue. Hope that although one day we will die, part of the world we knew and loved will sustain.

New metaphors for sustainability: song

November 14, 2011Ashden DirectoryAssocia, Bob Dylan Chronicles, Bob Dylan Chronicles Volume One, Climate Change, Complete Verse, Friend John, Grimaldi, John Cartwright, Key Change, Losing Things, Metaphors, Musician Friend, Night Songs, Particularity, Peoples Minds, Rhythm Rhyme, Robert Butler, Sue Palmer, Twitter, Two Kinds Of Sounds, Verse Chorus Verse

This post comes to you from Ashden Directory

Sue Palmer, an artist making live and digital work with people and place, and author of inquiline, a blog on botany and art, suggests song as a metaphor for sustainability.

the extraordinary song:often straightforward, yet infinitely complex

the diversity (how many millions have been created)

the particularity (each one individual)

a structure enabling brilliant inventiveness

often a voice and an instrument

two kinds of sounds, working

my musician friend John talks about chords as metaphors

about how two â€˜discordantâ€™ tones are shifted

through the addition of a third note, bringing resolve

songs are free, and they can make someone a living

they help people make it through the day, and night

songs have changed peoplesâ€™ minds

a song can contain a lot of information, honed,

ideas packed in language,

rhythm, rhyme

thereâ€™s craft in it, and anyone can do it

thereâ€™s multiple ways to begin, and a sense when itâ€™s complete

verse, chorus, verse, chorus, middle eight, chorus,

bridge

and key change, â€˜ad lib to fadeâ€™

the pleasure of the repetition, letting the song free up, go

When I think of sustainability, I usually think of losing things, resources, capacity, and I find my materially-centred thought frustrating.

‘If anything, I wanted to understand things and then be free of them. I needed to learn how to telescope things, ideas. Things were too big to see all at once, like all the books in the library – everything laying around on all the tables. You might be able to put it all into one paragraph or into one verse of a song if you could get it right’, Bob Dylan, Chronicles, Volume One, 2004.

photo: by Orelie Grimaldi of John Cartwright playing C#m7

Margaret Atwood is with the bears

November 10, 2011Ashden DirectoryAssociate Editor, Bbc, Bbc Radio 4, Climate Change, Directory, Element, Features Interviews, Flowers, Helen Simpson, Interviews News, Margaret Atwood, Mariella Frostrup, Metaphors, Reflection, Robert Butler, Short Stories, Six Ways, sustainability, Timeline, Twitter

This post comes to you from Ashden Directory
Margaret Atwood and Helen Simpson discuss I’m With The Bears, a new collection of short stories about climate change, with Mariella Frostrup on BBC Radio 4’s Open Book.

Helen Simpson says one problem of writing about climate change is the moralizing:

“That’s about as popular as telling someone they need to lose weight. It’s the nagging and being preached at element that is very hard to avoid around this subjectâ€.

New Metaphors for Sustainability: A matter of time

October 31, 2011Ashden DirectoryChristopher Logue, Climate Change Research, Climate Negotiations, Corporate Accountability, Counter Culture, East India Company, Financial Dimensions, Fundamental Text, Geological Time, Holocene, Iliad, Profound Shift, Resource Time, Seventh Generation, Time Future, Time Horizon, Time Nick, Time Present, Tiny Fraction, War Music

This post comes to you from Ashden Directory

Nick Robinsâ€™ metaphor suggests a profound shift in our perceptions of time. Nick works in the policy, operational and financial dimensions of corporate accountability and sustainability. He is author of The Corporation that Changed the World: How the East India Company Shaped the Modern MultinationalÂ (2006) and in 2011 was rated as the leading analyst for climate change research in the ThomsonExtel survey.

In the end, sustainability is all about the allocation of the scarcest resource: time. How much time do we devote to what in the present, and how do we balance the imperatives of time past, time present and time future?

The task, then, is to defeat the ravages of geological time and transfer those things of value from one civilisation to the next, particularly now that we have passed during our lifetimes from the Holocene to the Anthropocene.

Nearly all of what we consider to be valuable in human society occupies a tiny fraction of our existence as a species (some 2 million years).

For me, Homer’s Iliad is the archetype of human value across time. As the poet Christopher Logue discusses in the introduction to his recent interpretation, War Music, the Iliad is already a work that has survived the collapse of a number of civilisations through luck, persistence and care. But will it survive ours?

The Iliad was written perhaps in the 8th century BCE, some 2,800 years ago. For me, sustainability means enabling those in the future to have an equivalent chance to benefit from this fundamental text, constructing an arc into the future 2,800 years long. This means that my time horizon is (or should be) 4811 AD, far further out that the 2050 timelines of the climate negotiations or the ‘seventh generation’ thinking of the counter-culture.

The consequences of this shift in perspective are profound: we need to conceive sustainability as beyond culture and indeed language, as the transmission of value beyond time.

All the metaphors in our series so far are collected here.