“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” Maya Angelou
“A good story should never be spoiled by the truth” Steve Jones
Preface
I claim no literary competence, I am a storyteller not a novelist, closer to anecdotes than academia; yet I have a story to tell, and it has been burning inside me for many years. I am not quite sure where to begin and I am still not sure where it ends, but I knew right away when I was in the middle, so it feels only proper to start there.
I was scribbling notes even as it was happening and have been trying to capture the experience ever since, it is my story, yet as I write I feel more that it is the story of the world I was born into and this is my attempt to make sense of the crazy times we find ourselves in. This is a story that is yet to be resoloved, and in what remains of our lifetimes most of us are going to see how things pan out.
Here is a summary back story.
I was born onto a 1960’s Shropshire farm, leased to Stewart and Josephine, my parents, where they ran a traditional mixed enterprise, with a patchwork of small arable fields as well as a swathe of upland sheep country. They had middle class aspirations which even now in their ‘80s they are still trying to live up to, both were born before the war as they called it, of course they meant WW2 and it had been a defining experience for them, and their generation. And that generation seemed woven into the fabric of the community, upholders of tradition and confident and mature, seemingly certain about the world they were part of, and as a child I recall being happy to let the world of adults go over my head, it did not hold much attraction I was happy, lost in a world of fantasy and play.
Earliest experiences were of exploration and play around the farm, wading through patches of nettles into tumbled down buildings, befriending semi-feral cats; their childhood experiences were shaped by the blitz, by evacuation, post-war austerity and the formality of 1950’s Britain.
On completing his national service my Father saw an escape, a chance to live a life beyond the suffocating and pre-determined world he had been born into, with foreign service his ambitions had expanded along with his horizons. Returning home, kit bag on shoulder his Mother announced that she was so glad he was back as she was off, leaving the farm for her homeland of Scotland. His father, crippled by rheumatoid arthritis had taken to his bed and it was down to Dad to save a failing farm, pay off the debts, bail out the rest of the family and to support his slightly older brother through the rest of his education.
‘We didn’t have choices’ he would later say.
I cannot be anything but grateful for everything they did for us, myself, and my sister, but this tale is not about them, it is about the world we inherited from that war-torn generation. Somewhere along the line the post-war dream has morphed into a post world nightmare,they moved heaven and earth as best they could to give us the upbringing they thought best, whilst at the same time the world we thought we were creating is screaming back at us in pain.
The first 9 years of my life was hatched in the womb of this place, Oaklands farm, a world of its own. I loved it, it was a great, complex, and ever changing tapestry to grow up in, full of adventure, some imagined and some real. Looking back my memories are of a life immersed in nature, climbing trees, making dens, cooking on stick fires, and surrounded by animals, playing with friends and siblings, and part of a community. As a small child I was free to roam, free to explore, I could walk a mile or two in any direction and not bump into anyone who did not know who my family was or where I must come from.
These first years of my life was inside a rural world that was actually rapidly disappearing, I had no idea at the time, but I was gaining an insight into the last remnants of an idyl that was in its last days. 5 or 6 guys would greet my Dad each morning, ‘what are we doing today Boss?’, and in the season van loads of pickers and packers would arrive from the Black Country, skilled in sorting and bagging spuds, and trimming spring onions, plucking turkeys or any other produce there might be needing attention. The work teams knew each other, many were related, there were 7 Watkins brothers that had worked across many of the local farms and old man Watkins was the shepherd at Oaklands. This was the social glue that held rural communities together, gave some kind of consistency and provided an able and flexible workforce, and carried inter generational knowledge about the hills, hedges and hollows of the shire.
When I was 9 or 10 we lost the lease of the farm, it was sold out from under us, to a company who installed a farm manager.
[in recent conversations with Dad I discovered I was wrong about this, and it was much more complicated, actually he was trapped inside a lease he could not break, when circumstances shifted he was suddenly able to escape from the farm, and they did that. Our little world ending felt catestrophic at the time, but throughout the 70’s and 80’s farming had the highest suicide rates, two of my Dad’s contemporaries died by their own hand. They had escaped an industry that was chaging beyond all recognition, and an industry that has become ever more capital intensive, ever more rapacious as smaller farms were merged into ever bigger ones.]
The workers became contractors, gangs of people were replaced with machines, hedges, ditches, and ponds were ripped out to make big tractor-friendly fields. Although I did not have the words to articulate my thoughts at the time, I knew it was wrong. This was not progress, it was biocide, ecocide, the wilful destruction of whole ecosystems to further production. Those copses, hedges, and streams where we had played every day of our childhood had been teaming with freshwater shrimps, fishes, tadpoles, birds, and frogs, the air thick with insects -- now they had nowhere to live. I was told that this is the future, this is how to feed the world, but this was not a future I wanted to be part of, even at nine I knew it was wrong. There had to be another way.
Life after the farm must have sent my parents into a deep shock, readjusting and reinventing themselves to fit into a world they had not prepared for, instead of being the masters of their own, now they had to conform to this urbanising society around them. Or maybe it was more a case of trying hard to catch up the world that had almost left them behind. Starting new careers as they entered their 40’s and chasing after qualifications that had not previously needed.
Chatting with Dad very recently he said only their friends support helped them through it. Having no job, losing the farm with a young family must have been terrifying and in 1972-73 the economy was tanking, the oil shhocks were hitting and he was trying to enter the finance industry.
They did alright in the end and credit to them, their best years were the later ones, they each rose the top of the new professions they had chosen, and being grandparents to my older sister’s kids was their triumph. Like many young parents they were a bit distracted by their own life-challenges when we were growing up, and second time around they were able to make the grandchildren their focus.
The experience of growing up on the farm, with busy engaged parents gave significant physical and emotional space to explore, both for me and especially my sister. She had befriended Watkins the shepherd as a young girl and was never happier than out in the fields, in later years she would serenade the cows in the next door field with her flute. As I recall when school time came around she had clearly decided that the farm was a way more fun and fruitful way to spend her time, and had to see the school educational therapist more than a few times to be persuaded otherwise.
I think for us as children the end of the farm life was being thrust into a more sub-urban existence, the end of childhood, the end of an idyllic phase of life, of endless play and exploration. For the parents it was a release from a mountain of responsibilities and an opportunity for the first time really, to begin to make their own life choices, albeit with 2 kids and no money.
They set us free, my Dad had inherited his Fathers debts and I got a free education right up to post-graduate level, a students grant and no tuition fees. Education was what I got, certainly not a huge academic me, but it was enough to light up my fascinations and also bring me into the company of a more diverse group of people. I studied sustainable development, this new fangled set of ideas that is a fusion of economics and ecology, biology and sociology, asking the question just how do we live on this planet without destrying it at the same time? I graduated in 1984, that year of doom laden prophecy armed with the information that our economic models were deeply unsustainable and the evidence was rapidly building documenting the damge we were already causing to our essential life support systems.
My bit of this story really begins when I reached a point in my life where I didn’t know exactly what I was looking for, but I was definitely seeking something, and I was prepared to go to the ends of the earth to find it.
At 26 and feeling deepening frustrations with the Thatcher infused ‘80’s, that awful decade when the free marketeers came to town, I decided I needed to get away. I cashed in my meagre possessions for a roll of travellers’ cheques and together with my companion bought a one-way ticket to Nairobi, we stumbled out onto the ring-road from the airport and hitched hiked for a whole year. The plan was to go wherever the wind blew us and to see what fate had in store.
The name given to this story has already changed many times, named after Chimanimani, that place in Eastern Zimbabwe where this journey become a destination, and from there the jurney home began. I wanted to use “searching for sanity” as subtitle, as I feel I have always been trying to make sense of what to my mind clearly does not. We have built an economy that sets us at odds with the natural world. The very thing that nurtures and sustains turns out to be the very thing we fail to value and protect; this is the sanity I have been searching for, just exactly how to we get out of this mess? The post-war economy turned into a war on nature and as we progress it is starting to feel more and more like a war on people as well.
It feels that for the whole of my life our global economy has been centred around the military, as if that was the ultimate goal. There is never a question of if we can afford the next generation of guns, ships and tanks, tactical nuclear devices, and the rest of it. What seems clear to me and no doubt a great many others also, is that to secure a meaningful future we must cease this competition over scarce resources and understand that viewed through a perspective of nature, resources become abundant. The only limit is our own imagination. The insecurities that lead us to militarism is a failing of human culture.
At its heart this book is about permaculture, a system that is intended to retune our especially westernized brains to harmonize with nature. What is self-apparent to our first nation cousins and ancestors, that we fail to grasp is that we are merely part of the fabric of nature, we are not set apart from it, we are enmeshed within it. We cannot digest the food we eat without the billions of microbes in our gut, plants can’t grow healthily without the zillion of miles of mycelium in the soil, the rain from the skies is evaporated from the leaves of plants, and purified by the ground it soaks through, everything is in some way connected. When we harm our ecosystem, we harm ourselves, there can be no sacrifice zones, it is all sacred.
Yes, we humans have ventured into space, but only by bringing our earth-bound life support systems with us. Stepping out of our living planet makes us realise the fragility of our home and the essential requirement of nurturing and harmonizing with it, not trying to dominate and beat it into submission. In the earlier part of my life my quest was to find a way out the insanity, of this eco-destructive world and world view. I went looking, and what presented itself to me, the thing that did finally make sense, was this nature-informed world view and way problem solving, permaculture.
I hope in some small way this strange journey that brought me to this place can in some way contribute to this transition process for others. We need a new and universal way of understanding our world, a new language and that language is permaculture.
Steven Jones
Llanrhaeadr ym Mochnant 2023
Credits and dedication
Ceramic bowl by Kevin Hough
Kevin had said that ceramics represented the ultimate challenge to him. The choice of the clay, the texture, shape and form of the creation, the glaze and the patterning, so many variables and so many considerations for the artist. Conceptual challenges of aesthetics, and the physical challenge of the kiln, the timing, the tempreture, all these factors must come together harmoniously.
This story is about love
To Grace, cariad
To Sue Ellen, my travel buddy
Graham Metlerkamp, Kevin and Peter Hough; without whom, well who knows?
Stewart and Josephine, sister Caroline of course and the clan, Georgie, Lucy, Edward, eternal love!
Sailor is watching!
2023 proves to be a another climate wake-up call
The year 2023 has borne witness to unprecedented weather extremes, foretelling a grim future if urgent climate action is not taken. With Hurricane Idalia, Super Typhoon Saola, and record-breaking temperatures, leading climate scientists warn that such events could become the new norm within the next decade.
The world’s vulnerability to these events is more alarming than anticipated, indicating an acceleration of climate change
https://innovationorigins.com/en/2023-proves-to-be-a-another-climate-wake-up-call/
Peter Kalmus speaks about the climate emergency and global heating.
This was a keynote speech given by Peter to the Green party in 2023
“we must rise up together against this capitalist death cult”
“it is hard for me to continue to believe in electoral politics”
This is the first draft of this section, corrections and updates to follow