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.

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.

The numinous landscape of South Worcestershire, shown here in the Malvern Hills, has long been the inspiration for music, of which Elgar's is the outstanding example, and poetry, including the less well-known Poly-Olbion - please see my other post for today @ http://woodwose.wordpress.com/

However, the wider landscape context created by the Malverns, the Severn Valley and Bredon Hill, an outlier of the Cotswolds, has perhaps not received the cultural attention it merits. I have, therefore, resumed a longstanding personal project focused on Crookbarrow Hill, at the edge of Worcester, as the starting point for an exploration of this cultural landscape.

Incidentally, the slow progress of this project is largely due to my involvement in various spatial planning sagas - see
www.crookbarrow.com/
http://crookbarrow.wordpress.com/
http://smartlimits2growth.wordpress.com/
In case the slow pace continues I've decided to publish the introduction :

MESSAGES FROM THE MOUND

A Cultural Study of Crookbarrow Hill

Introduction
For some years now I have intended to write a history of Crookbarrow Hill, but the time has never been right. Today, 30 October 2010, I resumed “The Green Man Project” blog with a post (see below) on “The Story of Silbury Hill”, a book recently published by English Heritage which suggests that Europe’s largest man-made mound may have been developed over many centuries as part of an even more extensive landscape project in what is now the Avebury World Heritage site in Wiltshire. My own intuition is that the man-moulded mound known variously as Crookbarrow Hill, Brockhill and the Whittington Tump, next to Junction 7 of the M5 Motorway in Worcestershire is also part of a much larger ancient landscape discourse, I shall call it: a “big conversation” extending back into prehistory circumscribed to the west by the Malvern Hills, to the east by Bredon Hill, and with the Severn River providing the north-south axis.

Having at last set the scene for “A Cultural Study of Crookbarrow Hill”, I shall explain why I have chosen this intellectual form of inquiry rather than a more straightforward historical account, or the cultural history which I also considered. The reasons for this in part reflect my academic education in both English literary and urban and regional planning studies, and the fact that I am neither a historian nor an archaeologist. I also have a strong interest in depth psychology, particularly Jungian, in contemporary green spirituality, in the historical relationship between the Christian religion and Britain’s pagan legacy, and in what are widely known as “earth mysteries”, including ley lines. More mundanely, I am concerned with how modern society, and more specifically government agencies, value and protect the historic environment in different parts of the British Isles, especially in England and Wales. “A Cultural Study”, therefore, seems to lend itself best to the diversity of my interests and, indeed, to the intellectual plurality of perspectives inspired by the visual panorama from Crookbarrow Hill itself.

The study is intended to cover the following issues and themes:

• Description of Crookbarrow Hill at the present time
• The numinous landscapes of South Worcestershire
• Seasonal festivals, religious events and local folklore
• Wider interpretations of the role of hill barrows etc
• Depth psychology and Earth Mysteries movement
• Future management of Crookbarrow and environs*

* These are presently used for horse pasture: see my recent post @ http://horsework.wordpress.com/ In short, there is no management of Crookbarrow Hill and environs by the relevant agencies, in sad contrast to the attention given to ancient sites elsewhere. Perhaps the main reason for this is that Crookbarrow Hill falls within an area identified for urban development at the present time.

THE STORY OF SILBURY HILL is a new publication by English Heritage which explores the development of the largest prehistoric mound in Europe. Latest research suggests that construction of Silbury Hill may have taken place over many centuries as part of the unfoldment of an "unconscious collective" master plan for the wider landscape of Avebury. As such, "The Avebury Project" might be interpreted as the co-operative work of prehistoric society's "Collective Unconscious"*, and a message in a mound for modern man.

* A term coined by Carl Jung