Writing // Walking // Facilitating // Speaking

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Underpinning all my work is what I’ve come to identify as a ‘quiet environmentalism’. There is a lot of noise in the world, and a lot of noise about the state of the world, our place in the world, and the future of the world. The Anthropocene roars. Being loud – speaking up, speaking out – is important when the volume generated by the forces of environmental degradation and alienation are deafening too. But shouting only gets us so far.

And for many people the real challenge is finding a voice and how to use it in the first place.

Often, the opposite of loud activitism, the inverse of ‘fierce hopefulness’, is seen as a retreat or an abandonment. Many people seeking a reconnection with the world or a model for sustainable, ethical living end up removing themselves from society. There are plenty of quiet, beautiful, (re)wild places where people are consciously making flourishing ecologies far from the trappings of modern life. Other groups move in the opposite direction, towards a radical recolonisation of places abandoned by industry or urban change, modelling in this liminal, hybrid infrastructures adventurous, artistic and aesthetic ways of living-in and living-with the other recolonisers – plants, minerals, animals, water.

But for many people, this conscious uncoupling from mainstream domestic economies is out of reach.

Who are these ‘many people’? They are me, possibly you, and the other millions of people entangled so deeply in the mesh of modernity that the movement implicit in activism or explicit in retreat or recolonisation seems impossible. For us, the problems of the Anthropocene and the fears of the climate emergency seem both everywhere and nowhere, round every corner yet impossibly disconnected from the things we can control. It is no use shouting, and no use moving. There is quiet work to do right here, where we are – wherever we are.

Quiet Environmentalism is my effort, drawing on more than 20 years of reading and thinking about the environment and following in the giant footsteps of Bruno Latour, Donna Haraway and many others, to make sense of what we can do here and now to understand what here and now really means. Where are we? When are we? On what do we depend?

My work in this area covers writing, walking, facilitating and co-producing, speaking and training. Please do use the links above to find out more about how we might work together, and follow my latest output on Substack.

Ephemera

Canyards Hills 24-11-22 // Grouse burst up into the wind / and arc away like spindrift / to the north. Beyond the wall / the land kneels, bowing to the / weight of years, its broken brow / broad, falling, cragged and furrowed / birch inhabited, wind stilled / grouse gone.