A PROLIFIC PEAR TREE IN AN OLD ORCHARD

I found this wonderful crop of pears on a very large tree in an orchard which apparently has not been cultivated for over fifty years. The plums in my previous post were from the same site, which has also produced great amounts of other varieties, including greengages, various types of apple and a great abundance of damsons.

VICTORIA PLUMS FOR THE FEAST OF FIRST FRUITS

According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle "The Feast of First Fruits" was celebrated at the beginning of August as a Christian festival. The festival of Lammas, associated with the wheat harvest, is also celebrated between 1st and 2nd August.

Sand Lizards Courting - Great picture from the Ukraine by young phographer Alexey Timoshenko

POLITICAL ECOLOGIES, PARLIAMENTS OF BIRDS & TWITTER

The above image is taken from the Wikipedia entry for "The Conference of the Birds", a twelfth century Persian poem whose central metaphor of a feathered political congress was tweeted around the medieval world. Geoffrey Chaucer's "Parliament of Birds" takes up the theme in fourteenth century England.

I want to use this theme of avian concourse to explore the modern concept of "political ecologies", a term that I shall use with reference to the work on deep ecology of Joanna Macy and John Seed. A Buddhist scholar, Macy developed the notion of "A Council of All Beings" as a means of a extending human spirituality and political accountability back into the natural world, in the manner of many indigenous peoples.

In fact, the provenance of animal councils, bird congress and natural governance in general can be traced back to the dawn of civilisation, and extends from ancient times to the present day. Moreover, in periods of political and religious oppression, the use of creature conferences to air grievances and suggest alternative forms of secular and spiritual governance is commonplace, with the species represented usually having particular national cultural resonance

The advent of the social networking facility called "Twitter" can, therefore, be interpreted as providing the masses with the means of such avian and animal concourse, and it is most appropriate that the facility has been activated around the world by people seeking progressive change in local and central governments. More specifically, it was this "new conference of the birds" which heralded the so-called Arab Spring of 2011.

THE POETRY OF BIRDS - EDITED BY SIMON ARMITAGE & TIM DEE (VIKING PENGUIN)

A family of fledgling tits who, having outgrown the nest roost rather precariously by the roadside, remind me of Emily Dickinson's poem "Hope" from "The Poetry of Birds" anthology.

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune--without the words,
And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.

I've heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.

"The Poetry of Birds" is an excellent collection: a veritable aviary of verse.

"Botany Bay", South Worcestershire, 1 May 2011

CLIMATE CHANGE, TRANSPORT AND MODERN LIFE

Last Sunday afternoon, I took a cycle and walk around Kempsey Common, several miles south Worcester, with my camera: please see pictures in my photo-post of yesterday. Notwithstanding its "deep rural" appearance, this area is actually bisected by the M5 motorway, which is a mere stone's throw from the beautiful thatched cottage shown in the second photograph.

My first visit to Kempsey Common was in 2002, when I met an elderly man pushing his bicycle, on which he had travelled from Worcester for recreation. He also enjoyed allotment gardening. However, whilst there is some indication that during the past nine years the latter activity has grown in popularity and that demand for allotments exceeds supply, I do not detect much increase in cycling to nearby beauty spots amongst Worcester folk. Indeed I saw very few people at all on Sunday afternoon, although there seemed to be a lot of traffic on the motorway.

Also noteworthy was the heat of the day and the dryness of the ground, almost as if Winter had passed rapidly into Summer. Nevertheless, observable climate change and the underlying need to conserve energy for the environment and domestic economy do not appear to be reducing people's desire for motorised travel mobility.

One reason for this, I would suggest, is the modern psyche's need for distraction of the kind provided by the car journey together with England's main weekend leisure activity: shopping. Self-directed unstructured activity in natural surroundings is, increasingly, not just beyond the capacity of the young to enjoy, but also many of their elders, which is a great shame.