In the Guardian, George Monbiot and Steven Poole have recently put forward contesting views of environmental writing.
Monbiot’s riposte to Poole’s critical review of a Romantic strand of contemporary nature writing is pinging round t’internet. Affronted by Poole’s criticisms of his book Feral, Monbiot asserts that Poole is some kind of Tory/Mao Tse Tung/Red Guard hybrid, a humanities graduate dupe of postmodernism and, above all, a philistine.
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George Monbiot’s Feral: Searching for enchantment on the frontiers of rewilding is worth dipping into – unless you are one of those bourgeois escapists whom Steven Poole’s recent Guardian Review article identified as the likely readership for this genre of nature writing. In which case, you’ll probably want to read it from cover to cover.
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Changing More Than Lightbulbs’ main writer & editor is attending the UK Coops/Carnegie Trust workshop in Manchester, to find out about their Make Local News Work scheme. Hoping to learn more about how CMTL can develop into a hyperlocal news coop – along the lines of the pretty great Brixton Blog.
A CMTL steering group is forming, to work out how this can happen.
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Going where the wild things are stops Monbiot being bored – a problem for him, given his humdrum life of raising a kid, working and paying the bills – and he wants the rest of us to experience the same thrills. He is an evangelist for rewilding, the modish conservation concept that calls for the reintroduction of top predators like wolves, bear and lynx to certain regions where they have become extinct.
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Midway along his life’s path, George Monbiot found himself on a dreary moor with no track to show him the way.
Lacking a poet ghost to guide him on the necessary descent into the circles of hell, through purgatory and on to paradise, Monbiot’s new book Feral conjures an Edenic fantasy of re-forested uplands, prowled by wolves, beavers and other top predators. In his dreams, he has banished the pesky sheep and hill farmers who between them have degraded this once and future biodiverse ecosystem.
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Jeremy Deller may be Britain’s official political artist at the Venice Biennale, but Mark McGowan the Artist taxi driver is telling it like it is as usual. This time about the Tory Academisation programme. Another example of the merging of corporate and government interests.
Interesting video from Festival of Journalism in Perugia, about Crowd-sourced citizen journalism
Greg Sharzer’s 2012 book No Local: Why Small Scale Alternatives Won’t Change The World, may not be what advocates of re/localization want to hear. As the Danish proverb says, “To tell the truth is dangerous. To hear it is boring.”
Despite the best efforts of The League of Gentlemen, it’s an article of faith for many green groups (and the ConDem government, using the rubric of localism) that decentralised, small-scale organisations, businesses and networks will solve our environmental, economic and social problems. For example, Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful
and the Transition Network’s REconomy Project. Greg Sharzer questions this belief.
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Zed Books is publishing a new book by Lancaster Uni Prof John Urry, that looks like a must-read.
