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.