an aathing fae es pint o reference

transforms intil a pint o view.

Hadean is the first poem in the In-gangin sequence of Twilt.  Hadean proposes a narrative of Earth’s prehistory from between 4.5 billion and 4 billion years ago.

The original poem is written in Doric Scots and was first published in Tales Fae the Doric Side [Doric Books, 2023].

Over the last few months, I have been working poems from the In-gangin section of Twilt into a sequence of film poems which were premiered at the Royal Geological Society’s Earth Canvas event in London in September 2024. The film-poem is now available on my You-Tube channel and will be followed soon by its 5 companion poems in the sequence.

Inspirations

The work builds on inspirations, insights and practices developed in creating a performed spoken word version of my Pibroch collection for touring in 2023.  The show involved music from Fraser Fifield, based on a traditional source, and visual art generated by the author and sequenced and polished by Graeme Roger of Wildbird.  The experience established, for me, the power of words, music, visual effects and conversation in co-creating an understanding of the world.

Pibroch begat Twilt and Twilt begat the Hadean film poem.

In creating the film, I was conscious that I was trying to create a scientifically plausible, imaginable and poetically meaningful proposition about Earth (Here) four billion years ago. The work extracts ideas and relationships from scientific papers and related public science publications and web-content.  Though not featured in the current draft of Hadean, I used text analysis software to extract the geoscience vocabulary of the period and visualise the intensity of key ideas.  Geek that I am, I downloaded available datasets, built graphs in order to visualise time series and relationships.

One small part of the inspiration of the Earth Canvas conference was the insight, for me, that geologists, like artists, propose a narrative based on the experience.  They don’t – and can’t – impose a real world long since ‘past’. They imagine into a deep-time dynamic so that what is produced is a mix of the representation of NOW as maps and processes and a plausible narrative of how WE (as Earth) got here.  Though experiments determine the gas content of ice cores or the geochemistry of minerals the subject matter is always shifting, distorting, recombining.  This is not physics. Gravity is g but g is not stable or uniform.   It drifts, there are anomalies.  Yes: everything is physics, but variables change over time and the world must be recomputed again and again, often on the basis of sparse or incomplete data. Recomputed and reimagined, refreshed and performed. 

World Building 

Part of the standard vocabulary of fiction writers is ‘World Building’.  How do you describe the imaginary world your protagonists interact within at any point in historical or imaginary time? Geoscientists engage in a similar project – though for them, perhaps, it is better labelled ‘World explaining’, and the agonists are inorganic as well as organic.  And any case, the boundaries of inorganic and organic are in constant flux.  Which is to say, there are no boundaries.

Beyond the video editing I had practiced in developing Pibroch, the challenge of creating meaningful and expressive imagery of a distant past and place led me to exploring 3D modelling (or CGI) using the Blender application.  The learning curve was steep (and still is!).  But, as well as online documentation and forums, there is a vast wealth of shorts, demonstrations and tutorials online.  Blender animation has been applied to scientific & mathematical modelling as well as 2D cartoons, architectural design as well as Sci-Fi and Manga fantasies.  The Blender community of practice have generated a vast range of add-ons, textures and ‘sub-routines’ in pursuit of their desire for realism and/or cinematic-realism.

Time

Which brings me to ‘time’.  These world builders create nebulae, stars, planets, landscapes that look realistic and are essentially mathematically generated from scratch.  Simulated worlds in which creatures and things are felt to interact ‘believably’ in time. They can simulate crystal growth or orogenies, erosion or deposition, volcanoes or tsunamis.  Life forms, individual or in swarms. Noise and intention are skillfully, digitally and collaboratively blended. Whether in ‘Tolkien-Time’ or ‘Deep-Time’ or ‘Starwars Time’, their tools simulate what we think experience should look like in the given paradigm.

Hadean was the easy one to create.  A cooling ball of lithic stuff with decelerating angular velocity.  No more accurately hypothesised tectonic plates.  No hydrosphere (to speak of) and no cryosphere.  Not much in the way of atmosphere.

But the project raised profound questions about time for me.  If an Earth day (period to rotate about its axis by 360 degrees) was 5 hours in the early Hadean Eon, was that really 4.3 billion years ago?  Whose years?  How many days to a year?  [Yes: I know we can calibrate against atomic clocks but does this address relativistic issues?]

And eons, eras etcetera are vaguely defined based on progressive lack of hard data AND we have a perceptual bias towards stuff like us – Jurassic dinosaurs  – rather than life on the edge of the inorganic.  The stratigraphy isn’t set in stone.

Finally, writing a 2 minute poem about 500 million years of process demands selection, edit and abstraction.  There is poetic time as well as deep-time as well as traumatic-time.  Most of us find the birth of the moon or the KT event more interesting than the deposition of sediment over millenia.

I hope you enjoy this first instalment of Twilt in the link below.  If you do, please like subscribe and comment in my Youtube Channel or below this post.  Watch this space.

Hadean

Credits: many scientific papers and articles were used in research for Ingangin but, especially for Hadean, I am heavily indebted to the work of Chris Scotese.

The post Hadean appeared first on A View From the Long Grass.

Where is that?

Someone mentioned the 3 billion year history of the United Kingdom. Which begs too many questions.

But then again…where will it all end? It won’t!

The Geological Society’s spectacularly inspiring conference – Earth Canvas – stretched that canvas across of a frame of curiosity, synaesthesia and JOY.  Artists and Scientists came to confer on the overlap…or do I mean subduction?…or orogeny?…of their nominally but fallaciously distinct differences.

We share our lives in landscape…effectively defined by Tom Morisson as ‘Geology, Geomorphology, Water, Vegetation and Culture’.  And, as so evident in the 2 day conference, we are curious (and obsessed) with unpeeling the onion of time and causality that creates (present tense) the ‘ground beneath our feet’.

Pigments, both ground and from the ground, contend with geocomposing (as opposed to geosonification). The answer is 60…or 226…or that we all have personal fossils.

The Geological Society, based in the ‘prestigious’ confines of Burlington House of Picadilly put on a premiere where Hutton met Dante, Titian met Rangeoforma, Adams met …well..me for example.

The resulting conversation …and inspiration…feels like a first step in creating plausible bridges between the unhappily divorced metiers of geoscience and ‘art’…the sensuous and the sensible, the lithic and the erotic, the anaesthetic and the (frankly) libidinous.

There is no distinction.  We are mineral and rock is us.  Life created chalk and trace gas interactions in the atmosphere are our fates.

The challenge over the last 2 months of creating the film poem ‘In-gangin’ has been a meditation – imperfect as zazen always must be – on time and becoming (Dasein maybe but it’s too late to comment.}  The event the Earth Canvas conveners curated challenged me to excellence and inspired me to effort.

This is humanity at its intellectual best…without discarding deep or superficial feeling.

I am grateful to have been in the presence of such craft and wisdom.

The post Plausible Bridges appeared first on A View From the Long Grass.

This summer I have been taking stock and building upon the learnings and insights from the 2023 Pibroch tour.

One strand of that reflection has been a creative reimagination of (my) history whilst another has been the futurology of “Reflecting on a Future Dance” debuted at Fittie Community Hall and the Scottish Writers Cebtre in Spring 2024.

The third strand of that reflection has been an ongoing work on deep-time entitled ‘Twilt’. Twilt is an extended poetic work of time and place based (if that is a meaningful term) on the Deveron river catchment in which I currently bide.

One element of that work has been the development of a film-poem, In-gangin, reflecting/ narrating the last 4,500,000,000 years of Earth’s (our) journey…a project which has been both mind boggling and genuinely grounding.

I am privileged to be presenting the resultant art work – In-gangin – and a short presentatation as part of the Royal Geological Society’s ‘Earth Canvas’ conference 17th-18th September in London. I hope to share the work more widely in the near future.

My thanks to Pat Corbett and Steve Garrett for their encouragement in this.

The post Earth Canvas appeared first on A View From the Long Grass.

Consumptioun first appears in Scots literature around 1500 CE[i]. 

These early uses carried the sense of ‘using up’ through wear, destruction or wasting. 

The term was most commonly used to refer to what is now termed ‘pulmonary tuberculosis’ until economists appropriated the term,[ii]  

The pathological nature of consumption is, therefore, recognised from the very beginning.  Consumption is not synonymous with nurture or stewardship.  Consumption is a devastation. We are wasting away: we are wasting the Earth.

And yet, during the 18^th and 19^th centuries, consumption (i.e. tuberculosis) was romanticised in Europe.[iii]  Consumption ‘was identified as a disease which promoted beauty in women and “conferred beauty upon its sufferer.” The waiflike consumptive was “dramatically pale and ethereally thin with the red cheeks and  bright eyes of fever.” It was fashionable to look this way and, eventually, became a way of being “with damaging implications for women’s physical and mental health,” as well as their societal roles.’[iv]

As ‘consumers’ we literally use up the world.  But we know the Earth’s material resources and capacity to absorb pollution – including Greenhouse Gases are finite. Consumption will tip our climate into states we have never experienced as modern humans.

The figure below succinctly illustrates the choices which confront us.

Yet, especially for the affluent 10%, our consumptive state – with its ease, freedom of choice and luxuries – remains seductive. Like the ‘waxen cheeked’ consumptives of the begining of the Industrial Age, we are in danger of dying whilst wallowing in the ‘beautiful illusion’: the aptly named ‘White Plague’.

Footprints

Since the beginning of the 19th century, human beings have consumed/wasted more and more. The progress of this wasting accelerated soon after the Second World War.[iii]

Energy consumption is rising globally and in most regions of the world. But these ‘national’ aggregates are misleading. Clearly, use (or even availability) is not equally distributed at an individual level. Some areas with high consumption are not reducing demand. Other areas with already very low per capita consumption have little impact in terms of incremental growth in consumption.

Personally, my current carbon footprint is calculated to be about 3.64 tonnes of CO2 per annum.  This is about half the UK average and about 60% of it is driven by my diet according to the United Nation’s algorithm[v]. 

Of course, it wasn’t always like this.  For most of my life I worked in the oil industry, commuted to work by car (single occupancy) and frequently travelled by air both regionally and internationally[vi].

But carbon footprint calculations are only a partial, single-issue indicator of the demands our individual and collective consumption impose upon Earth’s resources.

2019 figures from a recent bp review illustrate how energy is used across different sectors of the notional word economy. The orange block – Industry – is energy converted to emergy – energy embedded in products.

In 2017, the human population consumed 88 billion tons of Earth’s natural resources.

• Biomass: 22.5 billion tonnes
• Fossil fuels: 15 billion tonnes
• Metal ores: 9.1 billion tonnes
• Non-metallic minerals: 41.7 billion tonnes

That is over 11 tons of natural resources for every single person on Earth. We are consuming the Earth far more quickly than life on Earth can reproduce itself, whilst ores and fossil fuels are essentially finite resources within ‘human’ timescales.

In 2023, Earth Overshoot Day – the day human consumption exceeded the Earth’s productive capacity – fell in August.  Every year it is getting earlier![vii]

And, as always, consumption is unequally distributed between individuals, within communities and between different regional societies. Some regions. communities and individuals never have an Earth-day.  Others outstrip planetary capacity many times over[viii].

The lifestyle of the ‘average’ UK resident demands about 2.6 Earths.  Of course, no-one is average and the UK currently has as high a level of ‘in-country inequality’ as it did during the Belle Epoque.  Climate-responsibility is based on wealth and the resource-intensity of our current lifestyles and those of our ancestors.

Slaves/ Addicts

We can’t/unlearn the comfort we derive/from warmth (or coolness), the thrill of speed, the ease of traction powering the plough.  Pibroch 2022

The power that fossil fuel consumption releases creates ‘goods’ with immediate benefits in terms of comfort, ease and capability. 

Another way of looking at our consumptive lifestyles is provided by an ergonomic  perspective on the roles fossil fuels play in many of our lifeways.

Prior to the 18th century, societies primarily depended upon human or animal labour to provide all forms of motive power.

One barrel of oil is equivalent to approximately 11 years of human labour.[ix] Sawing, digging, running, lifting, thinking.  Since the 1750s, our fossil-fuelled power tools have disconnected us from the physical effort our ‘standard of living’ requires in their absence.  The ‘average’ US citizen consuming 61 barrels of oil equivalent every year commands the equivalent of 700 fossil slaves[aa]. 

A recent article in The Conversation[x] suggested that our health and well-being would be greatly enhanced if we could emulate aspects of hunter-gatherer lifeways.

The specific elements contributing to well-being were identified as:

• A plant based diet
• Regular fasting
• Movement e.g. walking 6-16km/day
• Living in small egalitarian groups
• A sense of connection and meaning

The work that the hundreds of fossil slaves each of us exploit work against these healthier lifeways.

What I really, really want…

So what do we really want, and is that consistent with the energy and other resources we consume in our daily lives?

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs emerged as a favoured model of ‘human’ behaviour in the late 1940s, just as the post war acceleration in fossil fuel emissions was taking off[xi].   Initial growth rates – of 5% per annum in Europe – were, in part, driven by post-War regeneration and a reaction to the restrictions, austerities and colonial exploitation of preceding decades. Individuals wanted goods which they had been deprived of in the austerities of depression and war, even to the extent of prioritising lost luxuries over basic sustenance.

But consumer demand – and the aspiration to affluence – was also required to fill the additional productive capacity created during the war years, especially in America.  Simply restoring and meeting peoples functional needs was no longer sufficient to feed the beast.  Maslow’s hierarchy mapped out motivational drivers which the emerging advertising industry exploited.[xii].[xiii]   

But how should we invest resources between needs and wants?’  Are only the wealthy to have cakes and ale – as was commonly the case in the pre-modern period?  How do we choose between needs, social expectations and desire?

Priorities across regions and cultures vary. Space cooling in the Arabian Peninsula is, obviously, a greater priority than space heating. Saudi Arabia has the oil-rich option. Oil poor India must prioritise cooking and heating water.

In the ‘average’ week in 2018, the ‘average’ UK household spent almost £500 on stuff and services[xiv].

Among the big ticket items in alignment with Maslow hierarchy are food (12%), shelter (housing and fuel – 15%), love and belonging (recreation and culture – 15%). 

The Office for National Statistics’ (ONS) categories used above which don’t fit so comfortably with Maslow’s hierarchy are Transport(16%) and Restaurants & Hotels (15%).  We are, it seems, a society on the move, spending 31% of our weekly budget on ‘getting around’.

Of course, as above, no-one is average: many will only have enough for food, shelter and a bit of love & belonging: if they are lucky.

Consolidating these ‘average’ figures, somewhat approximately[xv], into one or other of Maslow’s categories[xvi] yields a distribution of ‘disposable income’ as shown here.[xvii]

The UK model is probably unusual, compared to global norms, in that safety (security & defence), education and health are largely provided by the state (out of taxation) rather than household disposable income to an unusually high degree.

If we, factor government spending (per household[xviii]) into this analysis in order to reflect non-discretionary expenditure on health, education and safety, the allocation of resources per British household looks like this.[xix]  :

So the ‘average’ UK households ‘allocation’ of monetary resources in a week in 2018 would look a bit like this:

The ‘average’ UK household’s ‘consumption’ of food, floorspace, heat & light may be far in excess of their physiological needs, of course[xx].  And an element of expenditure of clothing might be legitimately physiological, though the paradigm of fashion, fast or otherwise, suggests its primary drivers are esteem and belonging.

Mobility (AKA Transport) represents a significant element in our consumption and yet, according to BP’s figures, it is the least decarbonised of consuming sectors. (In fact, transport forms an even greater part since large transportation inputs are disguised in food-stuffs, clothing and manufactured goods due to the global nature of supply chains.)

Mobility  apart, it might feel that the ‘average’ UK household is over-investing in esteem and self-actualisation until we consider non-discretionary spending ‘on our behalf’: then we might reasonably feel under-invested.  Others, of course, don’t have that ‘luxury’…but perhaps they achieve these personal and social goods in other, less commodified ways.

My personal impact, therefore, depends on

• what I consume,
• how it is produced,
• where it came from,
• how much I consume
• how I manage the waste
• what I allow the state to do with my taxes 

Challenges and Opportunities

Different goods and services have different resource-intensities and, specifically, carbon-intensities.

One cannot compare apples and oranges: in fact, one can’t even compare avocados and avocados. 

How they were produced and where and how you consume them – and what you do with the waste afterwards – have a massive impact on your individual consumption.

Audiences and sources in the course of the 2023 Pibroch tour offered a range of insights, perspectives and challenges associated with each of the categories above. These are explored in the links below.

Physiological need

Safety

Love and Belonging

Esteem

Mobility

Cognitive

Aesthetic

Self actualisation

What is clear from those insights is that the weekly ‘carbon-basket’ – or perhaps the weekly ‘survival basket’ – is malleable and we, collectively, have considerable agency over our present and future impacts.

The con

One comment repeated in Pibroch post-show discussions was essentially “advertising drives everything.”  We are persuaded to want and consume more, even to the extent of negoitating unaffordable credit to enable immediate consumption.

The Great Acceleration[xxi] after World War 2 saw a massive escalation in CO2 emissions globally. 

I have written elsewhere about the correlation and divergence of population and GDP growth based on the work of Thomas Pickety[xxii].

The Kaya identity is a mathematical index based on the insight that the total emission level of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide can be expressed as the product of four factors:

• human population,
• GDP per capita,
• energy intensity (per unit of GDP)
• carbon intensity (emissions per unit of energy consumed)[xxiii]

As can be seen, slight improvements (i.e. reductions) in Carbon Intensity and Energy Intensity over the last 60 years have failed to balance the rapid growth in both Population and per capita GDP.  Growth – in both of these dimensions – drives CO₂ emissions drives climate change.  And remember, the average UK citizen consumes 2.6 Earths per annum – the average Indian citizen only consumes 0.8.[xxiv]

The con is that we are encouraged, by constructs of fashion and innovation, to buy more and more stuff.  New gadgets generate new desires demand more energy.  Changes in ‘fashion’ drive the replacement and discard of perfectly functional objects: clothes, cars, toys in pursuit of ‘distinction’.

We know our current resource-use  trajectory is unsustainable.   Yet, especially in the Global North, our patterns of consumption are driven by desire not need : or more precisely, our need for esteem and individuation is over-invested to an extent that the very existence of our communities are threatened.  Meanwhile, patterns of mobility (transmission issues) consume a disproportionate share of household income.

Waste

Waste is the ‘dark matter’ in our patterns of consumption.

All the goods that we ‘consume’ have a waste-footprint which contributes to our overall carbon footprint.

Mapping of energy flows in the US, for example, illustrated that two thirds of the potential energy generated in the USA in 2022 was essentially wasted in production and transmission.

The many comments on waste that emerged from the Pibroch discussions included:

• modern machinery and appliances are not designed to be repaired.
• all ‘discarded’ functional products should be returned to manufacturer who should be obliged to ensure their  reuse
• supermarkets should be forced to publish their levels of waste
• if food waste was a country it would have the 3rd highest carbon footprint after China and the USA
• consumers might prefer outlets with lower wastage rates
• different types of food contribute different proportions to the overall carbon footprint.  More waste in high carbon food types will cause greater warming

Some elements of waste arise from the production process but a significant proportion relates to the disposal of still functional objects or  surplus perishable goods.

For example…

FOOD WASTE : In 2018, households in the UK wasted 6.6 million tonnes of food.

CLOTHING WASTE : In the UK ,we buy more clothes per person  than any country in Europe. Around 300,000 tonnes of useable clothes are burned or buried in landfill each year.[xxv]

DIGITAL WASTE : If someone stores ten terabyte of images, games or video on the cloud, using data storage, they create a carbon footprint equivalent to half a tonne of CO₂e. per annum[xxvi]

WASTE ELECTRICAL & ELECTRONIC EQUIPMENT : 5.3 billion phones were thrown away in 2022. One 226g phone needs 74kg of raw materials, and the production of one microchip requires 36 litres of water.[xxvii]  The average mobile device has a usable lifespan of 7 years. On average,  consumers replace  their phones every 3.6 years.   Only 12% of phones are recycled.  80% of the parts in a phone are recyclable.[xxviii]

STORAGE : In a survey of middle class Los Angelinos, US Anthropologists discovered that 50% could no longer park in their 2 or 3 car garages because they were devoted to the storage of their ‘stuff’[xxix].    Those cherished clothes you’ll never wear again are ‘wasted’: neither consumed nor recycled but demanding new production, to meet needs and desires, by their ‘absence’.

In recent decades we have seen major drives to increase the levels and efficacy of recycling as a way of mitigating resource intensity.  The concept of the Circular Economy as originally promulgated was summarised in the 4Rs (Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, Recover). Since 2008, however, publications, especially from practitioners and consultancies, have revised the 4Rs to 1R (Recycle)[xxx]. 

Reuse and recycling have been a feature of human societies for millenia: gifting and hand-me-downs have extended the life of stuff beyond the limits of function and desire.  Heirlooms were social capital.  In the early modern period, clothes and fabrics were handed down over generations (and gratefully received). These are cultural features, culturally conditioned.

Although levels of recycling have increased dramatically, levels of consumption have outstripped them.  We are still not recycling anywhere near as much as we consume.  It is evident from the examples above that recycle is not having the impact on resource use that we need. 

Reduction in the level of overall consumption AND waste will be a major contributor to mitigation of climate change.  Subsumed in reduction, perhaps, is a 5^th R – replace. Or, more precisely, substitute where new ‘purchases’ are required. Different elements of our diet of food and clothing, for example, have different carbon-footprints.   Substituting beans for beef or linen for wool have significant impacts on the resource intensity.

Is there a future?

The last IPPC report (2023) forecast future global temperatures based on a range of possible societal trajectories from time-now, specifically in relation to energy use and GHG emissions:

There is a global scientific consensus (greater than 99%) that a rise in ‘average’global temperatures above 1.5 degrees compare to the pre-industrial period will cause more extreme storms, droughts, flooding, crop failures and disease in all regions.

The IPCC assessment of our current patterns of consumption (and the governmental policies that support them) suggests that we are not on track to reduce consumption, even of fossil fuels.   Illustrative pathways are categorised in terms of a range of strategic societal responses to the Climate Catastrophe[xxxi].

Each illustrative pathway exhibits different profiles – different trade-offs between

• demand reduction,
• fossil fuel phase out
• substitution of fossil fuels by renewables.

But, by the simple laws of physics, material use (and emergy) must flatline and pollution fall to zero to achieve sustainability (even at our currently degraded state).[xxxii]

Demand reduction, however, is the pathway in which individuals, households and communities have the greatest agency.  Other pathways depend upon the foresight and willingness of corporations and nation-states who, to date, show little appetite for the necessary change.

The climate impact comparison of current policies being pursued (CurPol) and Demand Reduction (IMP-LD) are illustrated here [xxxiii].

How can we, as WEIRD individuals and households, go about reducing consumption in ways to best contribute to an aggregate global reduction in demand, not only for energy generated by fossil fuel combustion but also other vital resources including biomass and ores?

Is there a past?

Scotland’s first oil boom lasted from the 18^th into the mid-20^th century.  Crews from the whaling station at  Bunabhainneadar on Harris killed and dismembered  thousands of blue and  fin whales between 1904 and 1951, generating  80,000 barrels of oil.   [7]

The Bunabhainneadar station was a Norwegian business, relocated there after the Norwegians had effectively exterminated all of the whales from Northern coastal waters.

During the Pibroch conversations, it was repeatedly pointed out that the UK and Scandinavian governments are doing good compared with other countries such as China and Russia.  It was remarked that ‘we shouldn’t be too hard on the UK Government’.

But a careful accounting of the material footprint for several nations, including those embedded in international trade, demonstrates that between 1990–2008 period, no country achieved a planned, deliberate economy-wide decoupling for a sustained length of time. Claims by the Global North to the contrary conceal the substantial offshoring of its production, and the associated ecological devastation, to the Global South.[xxxiv]”[9]

This strand of the discourse, around present and future consumption by individuals and communities, is mirrored in a second strand which focusses on historical Climate Responsibility – or perhaps better, Climate Guilt.

It is not only current lifeways but also national histories which have different carbon intensities.

British industrialists and colonists were prime movers in  industrialisation, mechanisation and extractive capitalism.

By 1830, British imports of cotton, wood, and sugar required the exploitation of more than 10 million hectares of cultivable land – 1.5 to 2 times all the cultivable land available in the UK.[10]

Since 1850, Britain’s former colony, USA, has released more than 509 Gigatonnes of CO₂  and is responsible for the largest share of historical emissions : over 20% of the global total.

China is a relatively distant second to the USA (11%), followed by Russia (7%), Brazil (5%) and Indonesia (4%). The latter pair are among the top 10 largest historical emitters due to CO2 from land use and deforestation[xxxv].

The UK’s European neighbours (which make up the European Union) are also large historical contributors at 22% of historical emissions.

Together, the US, Russia, Germany, the UK, Japan and Canada currently account for 10% of the world’s population but 39% of cumulative emissions since 1850.  In historical terms these WEIRD Northernerns are 4 times more guilty than the average Human. In comparison, China, India, Brazil and Indonesia account for 42% of the world’s population but just 23% of cumulative emissions 1850-2021.

Large annual emitters & producers today – such as India, Brazil or Saudi Arabia – are not large contributors in a historical context.

There is an evident resistance, however, to accept responsibility for the actions of our ancestors: actions which, for some of us, at least, enable our consumptive lifeways in the present.  Whilst the Bible advises that the ‘sins of the father’ will be visited upon on their children to the third and fourth generations[xxxvi]  – which takes us back to about 1860 in my case – the presentism of contemporary culture shirks historical accountability at a regional and planetary level.

 For example, the current UK government believes “trying to unpick our history is not the right way forward” with respect to slavery reparations to the countries of the Caribbean. The current Prime Minister – Rishi Sunak – rejects calls to apologise and pay reparations. [xxxvii]

Conclusion

“Folk need to remember – and some still do – that it wasn’t always like this.  For example, the  ratio of cars to households in Liverpool in the 1980s was 1 per 9 households.”

It was pointed out during the Pibroch conversations that ‘there is a tension between Energy as a Commodity (the dominant force in modernity) and Energy as Commons’.   The same is surely true of the hydrosphere, the lithosphere, the atmosphere, the cryosphere and bioproductivity: commons which are shared within and across biomes.

Interconnectedness is the compelling lesson of Climate Science yet individualism (and atomisation) are the dominant paradigm of modernity : private spaces, private interests, private property.

The wasting disease of consumption is propagated by the over-stimulation of ungratified desires, hungers that rot in the fridge, evanescent dress-codes, the desire to be different and keeping up with Jones who we never really speak to.

And always the need to travel: the rutted sea routes and contrails, the motorway tailbacks, the unpaid commuting overhead. 

It has been said that, in an idyllic (peasant) past, a person died ‘saturated with life’. Folk died with purpose, even if it was only that they had become elders, except in time of pestilence.   Now, the unsatisfiable tick-list of desires promotes the idea of the bucket-list: you will be unfinished if you don’t do/have this/that- and you won’t.

Collaborative consumption, through associations such as cooperatives, libraries of stuff, hand-me-downs, local producers and 15-minute communities offer models to reduce aggregate consumption and also nurture critical and ethical scrutiny of waste in the production of goods (the ‘supply chain’).

Just say: YES.

Boycotts offer end-users, working in association, the power to adjust the resource intensity of collective lifeways.

 Just say: NO.

But we need to deepen and expand critical climate literacies, both in this generation and the next.  Food (or product) labelling still embeds the paradigm that “I am too hurried/stressed/hashed to think much about it.”  We need space, time and conversation to really get to grips with our individual patterns of consumption and what triggers drive them.

And we need to integrate the moralistic and hedonistic perspectives of ‘our nature’: be persons (hedonistic) in association (moralist), be communities that care.

[i] Dictionaries of the Scots Language:: DOST :: consumptioun (dsl.ac.uk)

[ii] The term consumption traces back to Latin, consumere, to ‘take together’ but, from the outset, it was associated with the illness labelled phthisis  in Classical Greek which referred to ‘any disease that causes wasting of the body’. Ancient Greek φθίσις (phthísis, “consumption, decline, wasting away”), from φθίω (phthíō, “I waste away”). phthisis – Wiktionary, the free dictionary

[iii] Even in death she is beautiful: Confronting tuberculosis in art, literature and medicine (abdn.ac.uk)

[iv] Ibid

[iii]

Energy consumption, and especially fossil fuel combustion, took off as

1)corporations resorted to advertising to fill ‘productive’ capacity developed for military purposes

2)(partially) decolonised regions attempted to catch up with the standards of living of the erstwhile colonial powers.

[v] United Nations online platform for voluntary cancellation of certified emission reductions (CERs) (climateneutralnow.org) 

[vi] And I still eat meat (that big dietary contribution to my footprint).

[vii] Overuse of Resources on Earth (theworldcounts.com)

[viii] How many Earths? How many countries? – Earth Overshoot Day (footprintnetwork.org)

[ix] The Oil Drum: Europe | What is a Human Being Worth (in Terms of Energy)?

[aa] Based on human labour rates of $20/hr, a barrel of oil should be worth $200,000.   Of course, at $1.90 a day, it’s only worth about $3000.

[x] How living like a hunter-gatherer could improve your health (theconversation.com)

[xi] The Empire of Things, Frank Trentman.

[xii] At the turn of the millenium, Thomas Haufe suggested a societal model for design evolution in the period since World War 2.^[xii]

This model has been used to explore the parallels between design evolution and Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

An interpretation of these models of ‘human centred design’ is that the production of new ‘stuff’ – and therefore our consumption of energy and materials – increasingly focussed on aesthetic, status or individualising features.  Safe and functional technologies to meet most of our physiological needs were already available in the 1950s.

In this regard, industrial and service design deliberately commodified status, individuation and desire in order to drive increased resource consumption:  a trend intensified by the targeting algorithms of big data on the internet.

[xiii] Maslow’s rule of thumb reflects a moralistic strand in philosophy.  Needs should be satisfied before wants (or desires).  But, across different cultures, there is also a hedonistic-libertarian strand.  Studies of low income labourers in China in the mid-20^th century found they spent a ‘disproportionate’ proportion of their income on socialising and festivals.  Spectacular hospitality – for example Indian weddings – illustrate that many lower income households prioritize belonging and esteem over physiological or security needs. Trentam ibid.

[xiv]   This figure excludes expenditure on professional services, taxes, mortgage interest payments & insurances.  Figures are per household not per capita. 

  Family spending in the UK – Office for National Statistics (ons.gov.uk)

Expenditure – Office for National Statistics (ons.gov.uk).

[xv] The rough categorisation is documented in the table below.  I accept that the choice to assign tourism to self-actualisation rather than mobility (for example) is rough & ready.

[xvi] Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs (simplypsychology.org)

[xvii] ONS ibid

[xviii] There were 27.6M households in the UK in 2018

[xix] I have allocated public order, defence and social protection to safety, education to cognitive, health, housing and personal social services to physiological and transport to mobility.  Numbers Game, February 2018 | Public Finance

[xx] I find it interesting that, in the UK, safety & cognition (education) (and health) are not regarded as discretionary expenditure and have been abrogated to the state who define who and what is kept safe and, to an extent, what and how we ‘know’.

[xxi] Great Acceleration – Wikipedia

[xxii] Capital and its Discontents

[xxiii] Emissions by sector: where do greenhouse gases come from? – Our World in Data

[xxiv] Meanwhile, CO_2, though the most long lived are not the most pernicious of the greenhouse gases.   Methane release is also rising inexorably. Agricultural emissions of NO₂ show a similar trend.

[xxv] WRAP-valuing-our-clothes-the-cost-of-uk-fashion_WRAP.pdf, Sustainability of the fashion industry (parliament.uk)

[xxvi] What is the Carbon Footprint of Data Storage? (greenly.earth)

[xxvii] This Is Why Mobile Phone Recycling Matters (compareandrecycle.co.uk)

[xxviii] Mobile Phone Recycling Data – The Numbers – MobiCode

[xxix] Trentam ibid.

[xxx] Conceptualizing the circular economy: An analysis of 114 definitions – ScienceDirect

[xxxi] Interactive: The pathways to meeting the Paris Agreement’s 1.5C limit (carbonbrief.org)

[xxxii] Growth, Vaclav Smil

[xxxiii] Ibid

[xxxiv] Wiedmann et al., 2015

[xxxv] The low level of Land-use contribution to the UK’s carbon footprint since 1850 probably reflects the fact that the land was already deforested before 1800.

[xxxvi] Deuteronomy 5:9-10

[xxxvii] Slavery: Rishi Sunak rejects call to apologise and pay reparations – BBC News

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We’ll be performing at Johnshaven village hall, in Aberdeenshire, on the 20^th March, the first, we hope of a number of shows over the year.  Thanks to the community promoters at Johnshaven and to NEAT for inviting us to stage the show and engage in discussion there.

The next evening, 21^st  March, will see us at Fittie Community Hall in Aberdeen (or more precisely Fittie) for our exhibition/ discussion piece – Pibroch – Reflections for a Future Dance as part of Climate Week North-East 24.

Reflections for a Future Dance is a distillation of experiences from our 2023 Pibroch tour, using previous audience feedback, visuals, music and spoken word as a basis of conversation and inspiration for further meaningful interventions in the Climate Emergency.

It builds on the blog series – What I heard about Climate Justice in…  and the subsequent set of reflective pieces we’ve been blogging since December last year.

Reflections for a Future Dance is part of this year’s amazing Climate Week Nort East programme coordinated by NESCAN.  Catch up with all the events in the brochure at CWNE 2024 brochure-FINAL.pdf (hubspotusercontent-eu1.net)

We launched our 2023 tour as part of CWNE 2023 so it’s great to be back to share our learning and insights.

As always, with Pibroch, it’s all about the conversation.  Reflections for a Future Dance is free but please book a place at Pibroch – Reflecting on a future dance. Tickets, Thu 21 Mar 2024 at 19:00 | Eventbrite so we know how many to expect!

Tickets for Pibroch at Johnshaven are £10/£7 and are available from Johnshaven Stores or at neatshows.co.uk… Oh, and bring your own bottle (if you want)!

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The audiences during the 2023 tour offered hundreds of generous comments, insights and questions which were documented in the Pibroch Artist blog during the course of the tour.

Now is the time to prepare the ground and sow for 2024 and beyond.  We are actively planning more presentations and performances of Pibroch in the new year.  Some will be new work, some reprise of the existing successful format.  Each should contribute to an expanding and enriching conversation about climate justice and how we address the challenges we face in the present and into the future.

I have recognised for years that Pibroch is always going to be a work in progress – incorporating audience insights, elaborating and developing themes – just as the piobaireachd form elaborates on the Urlar.

This winter’s harvest will be served in two courses:  parallel and complementary.

The first is Cruinneachadh – a series of reports and reflections on the research and audience inputs collected in the course of the 2023 tour.  Its feedstock are the myriad perspectives and insights recorded in the Pibroch Artist Blog series: What I heard about Climate Justice.  But, whereas the blogs reported these conversation in a chronological and place-centred way, the Cruinneachadh posts will reflect on these comments and experiences thematically and, where appropriate, bring some of the insights up to date with current developments.

The second is Improvement Notice.  Improvement Notice arose from an intuition during the production and performance of Pibroch that we, collectively, need to re-imagine our pasts in order to imagine the future.

The practice of this work will be manifest in 3 bodies of work, published on this website.

Archeobiography – a selective re-imagining of moments and episodes from the lives of my documented ancestors from the beginning of the early modern period about 500 years ago. In this I am using place, time and imagination to situate the challenges and experiences which, in an epigenetic sense, inform my received sense of self. In this process I have uncovered strands that have been omitted from the dominant narrative of ‘who we were’ so there has been an effort to correct the image distorted by patriarchal, colonialist and extractivist constructs : but also the myths of denial we use to distance ourselves from responsibility, my insistence that my ‘stock’ is/was working class Irish and Gael doesn’t always stand up to close scrutiny.

Autobiography – an earnest attempt to excavate and relay my life experience in context.

Futurography  – a sequence of posts reflecting on the discoveries made in creating the other two strands and conclusions we might draw in imagining a different future.  Sort of ‘letters home’ from the journey.

Elements will be added to (and perhaps amended in) each of these threads as time passes.

I hope, taken together, these elements will provide a rich mulch in which new conversations, assemblies, insights and actions can germinate and flourish in the months & years ahead.

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Pibroch is coming to a place near you in the coming months – assuming you live in Scotland.

Thanks to the support of Creative Scotland and the National Lottery through their Touring Fund programme – and the continuing support of the Pibroch creative and production team – we’ll be taking the show to venues across Scotland between April and July of this year.

Kicking off on Sunday 2nd April at the Lemon Tree in Aberdeen as part of Climate Week North East, we’ll be visiting community venues, art centres and theatres in all corners of Scotland between now and our final performance at The Barn Arts Centre in Banchory on 6th July, the 35th anniversary of the Piper Alpha disaster.

Pibroch uses searing poetry created by Aberdeenshire-based writer and artist John Bolland, and mixes it with live music and striking visual imagery.

This multi-media performance represents the personal and social experiences of Piper Alpha survivors and their relationship to the challenges each of us face in a warming world – our very own burning platform – with a pressing need for change. It aims to inform, challenge and encourage that discussion.

Already we’re getting great press coverage in The Scotsman and Aberdeen Live. Tickets are onsale online for most of the venues, the set is built and van-ready and the team are excited to be going into final rehearsal at the Anatomy Rooms in Aberdeen next week.

16 out of the 17 programmed performances are now firmed up as shown on the map and listing below. The final venue is in the pipeline. Watch this space.

2^nd April  – Lemon Tree, Aberdeen

20^th April – Mareel, Lerwick

22nd April, Peterhead Theatre, Peterhead

1^st May  – Lyth Art Centre, Wick

3rd May, Lochinver Village Hall

4^th May  – An Lanntair, Stornaway

5^th May – Balivanich Community Hall, Benbecula

6th May – Braes Community Hall, Skye

19^th May – Harbour Arts, Irvine

20^th May – The Beacon, Greenock

23rd May – Catstrand, New Galloway

22nd May – Moffat Town Hall

4th June – Scottish Story Telling Centre, Edinburgh

6^th June – Gardyne Theatre, Broughty Ferry

7^th June – The Byre, St. Andrews

6^th July – The Barn, Banchory

Ticket sales are also available through our Linktree site as they become available.

It’s all a bit daunting.  Fourteen months ago we were still working out how to stage our premiere show at the marvellous Glenbuchat Hall, in mid-winter and amidst the COVID emergency.  Today we’re ready to do it again in venues small and big across Scotland: 17 times!

Our tour programming explicitly aims to bring the show to places and communities affected by the Piper Alpha Disaster and the Climate Emergency.  The post-industrial and remote island communities from which so many of the offshore workforce was drawn – many of which now face bearing the brunt of Climate Change and Climate Transition. 

And, of course, copies of Pibroch – The Book are still available through this website or from its wonderful publisher at Red Squirrel Press.

Looking forward to seeing you seeing us sometime in 2023!







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As we move towards rehearsals for Pibroch, I’ve been reflecting on those roots, both in my poetry and my prose writing.  Lives built around – or affected by – oil-frontier culture has been a thread through much of my writing since the 1980s.  ‘Write what you know’ they say : and I knew oil & gas, from the well-heads to the cloud-base of geopolitics. 

I’ve written about divers – I started out researching diving operations in the early 1980s – about the machinations of energy companies around the time of the 2^nd Gulf War in 2003 and about the dystopian culture that extractivists – whether corporate of individual – nurture in countries like Angola.

The comments of fellow poets, for example on my first collection, Fallen Stock, acknowledge that emphasis on working life, and the ambivalence of working in that particular sector of industry.

“These pieces speak from the seams between nature and industry, present and past, with an unflinching commitment to portraying reality in all its rough complexity.” Katie Ailes.

“There is a blue-collar muscularity and an urgency to get right the exact details of labour, landscape and memory.” Martin Malone.

Not all of this work is in print (yet)…but a number of these short-stories and poems have been published in magazines and anthologies.   The Truth About Harry – a vignettes set in Baku is available from this website and others be accessed among back issues of Pushing Out the Boat available online. 

Pushing Out the Boat, to commemorate its 10^th Anniversary, organised a series of radio broadcasts last year, in collaboration with shmu FM, to showcase writers who had been associated with the magazine over that period.  It was a privilege to be chosen as one of the readers.

I spent a very pleasant afternoon in the studio with Loraine Mudie, reading a number of poems first published in Pushing Out the Boat including The Type and Retention Bonus.  Loraine & I read the 3 segments published as 3 North East Vignettes, a climate-check on the world that was Aberdeen around 2013, an exploration of grief and dislocations.  The readings were threaded together with discussion of my practice, an eclectic selection of music Loraine had chosen and reflections on how these pieces related to Pibroch and my current projects.

The recordings was broadcast on 15^th September as part of shmu FM’s Words Up series and are still available to listen and download from the Pushing Out the Boat website here.

The Type, Retention Bonus and other related poems – including Thin Ice – first published by Luath Press in Aiblins – also formed part of my first poetry collection, Fallen Stock, available here or from my publisher, Red Squirrel Press.   

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Box-office links to the Pibroch launch at the Lemon Tree in Aberdeen on 2^nd April – and the other 15 performance dates – are up on our linktree page.

It is now over a year since the play’s first performance in Glenbuchat, a year spent planning and adapting the work for the demands of a national tour.  A year spent sustaining existing relationships and building new ones through emails and zoom meetings – shared folders in the cloud – individual effort meshed into a well-thought-out plan.

It was a delight to welcome Karen Tennent and Jane Hamilton to the team and to continue my working relationships with Mark, Martin, Simon, Graeme, Fraser and Brodie.  And we are grateful for the continuing support of Creative Scotland enabling us to make the plan happen.

The last six months has seen a meticulous piecing together of the elements: through venue & travel  bookings, set design and build, identification of improvements, social media and marketting and, in my case, yoga and voice exercises!

But this week we turned a particular corner, at Standing Ovation’s secret location on the edge of the Cabrach, most of the team converged to work together fitting up Karen Tennent’s design, constructing it, testing it, dismantling it and making sure it would fit in the van.

Simon Gane’s and Brodie Murray’s physical realisation of Karen’s design ideas is awesome.  It’s concrete and flexible, elegant in its simplicity and ingeniously devised.  And it works!

We tested the projector – sometimes key-stoning seems harder than the metal work to tune –  but not in Graeme Roger’s capable hands. Months of ‘virtual’ decision making:

 “Yes, that’ll work!”

“OK, let’s do that.”

And suddenly it is real.  And it does.

Yes – there is still magic to be added – light, music, the words – but Thursday 4^th March Pibroch passed another milestone.  Now, a short (but busy) march towards the rehearsal room and the stage.

The locations of the 16 scheduled performances is shown in the map above.  Check in on our linktree site to find dates and use the QR Code below to access our online programme.

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It is a striking monstrosity, visible across Aberdeen’s skyline – competing with church spires and well known landmarks. 

It’s arrival came “just days after port bosses declared their ambition for the new South Harbour to become a leading location for jack-up maintenance.” – presumably in competition with Dundee and Cromarty.  Roddy James, Chief Commercial Officer, Port of Aberdeen, apparently  said: “It’s exciting to welcome new types and sizes of vessels to the port, be that from oil and gas, renewables, cargo, or cruise. South Harbour’s tidally unrestricted deepwater berths, extensive laydown space and heavy lift capacity, make Aberdeen an attractive option for larger vessels.” 

Personally, with only 2 monohulls and a jack-up in the basin and 2 cranes of the middling type, I was unconvinced at claims of high berth utilisation and heavy lifting capacity.  Maybe I just visited on the wrong Wednesday.

But Roddy James ambition to encourage vessels from “oil and gas, renewables, cargo, or cruise” in that order represents a doubling down of the Port and the Energy Transition Zone organisation on oil & gas…don’t get me started on cruise liners.

To the oil & gas mindset, big is always beautiful.  High capitalisation.  Engineering machismo.  But “Innovator”?

Doris Reiter, Senior Vice President, bp North Sea, allegedly said: “The business decisions bp is taking today continue to positively impact the economy of Aberdeen, as they have for nearly 60 years. Our contract with Noble supports the supply chain to seize opportunities on our doorstep and a huge oil rig, sporting legs more than 200 metres in height, has become the largest ever vessel to visit the Port of Aberdeen.”

They do like those long legs!

The rig is in for a 3 month inspection & maintenance programme.  The PR implies that bp (formerly Beyond Petroleum but not so much now) will keep Aberdeen cosy in its long-term relationship with fossil fuels.  No innovation to be seen here: just a bigger version of a technology and a mind-set that stretches back to the first half of the 20^th century.

Press reports reveal the ‘Innovator’ will spend a year plugging played-out wells in the Central North Sea: business as usual therefore since abandonment has always been a key element of the oil majors scope of responsibility.   Less ‘visible’ is the Ocean Great White – no irony there then! The Great White is (allegedly) the world’s largest semi-submersible rig and is ‘making its way to the West of Shetland to carry out drilling work’ for bp.  New wells, more oil, more CO2, more planetary warming.   Sticking, as they say, to the knitting.

In a week which also saw some SNP leadership hopefuls rowing back from the Scottish Government’s  legally binding commitment to Net Zero by 2045, these ‘puffs’ suggest it is once again ‘OK’ to big up fossil fuel production for the short term economic well-being of Aberdeen and the engineering companies who support the oil & gas industry.  And, if gainfully employed doing so, where’s the incentive to genuinely innovate and realign practices with renewables and alternatives to capital intensive engineering?

The Noble Innovator is neither innovative or noble: and the publicity surrounding its arrival suggests zero commitment in the Aberdeen business and political elites to the necessary changes. They speak of a ‘Just Transition’ but no Transition which enables continuing global warming and the loss of millions or billions of lives can, by any stretch of the imagination, be described as ‘Just’.

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