Listen up! Are you a good listener? Let’s start with rhubarb. A few years ago a farm in Yorkshire posted a recording of their rhubarb growing. The bursting buds and squelching mud are quite a surprise – a mixture of popcorn and beatboxing. Tuning into the soundscape is an important way of reconnecting…
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I’m fifty-four years old, 6’3, and have the grace and poise of an arthritic hippopotamus, so I am not renowned for my dancing skills. It takes a lot to get me to shake my stuff without inhibition. Lots of beer can sometimes do it, or, apparently, a live performance from London post- punk ravers ‘Snapped…
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Death is an everyday occurrence and yet death is incomprehensible in the mind of the living. An old person dying is an ordinary event, but it is extraordinary if it is someone you love. The impact of grief can be so overwhelming that it can strip a person’s life of meaning and rinse them through…
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A small insect that has been lucky enough to receive media attention over the last few years due to declining numbers is the humble bee. Over a third of the food we eat relies on pollinators to grow, and there are a number of factors impacting bee populations across the UK. One of the…
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We are entering a time in UK public life where faith in long standing democratic processes and decision making are in terminal decline. The evidence of this is all around us. There have emerged single issues like Brexit and climate change, which the representative constituency system has failed to properly address. We have arrived…
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I am a member of a group of lawyers that has written a Declaration of Rebellion to call for Justice for All. We call for climate justice for everyone on Earth, for intergenerational justice, and for ecological justice. I will write about the last point here. Historically, in the UK legal system nature has…
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Once there was a story about a powerful king who mistreated his people, defied his gods, and sought to abuse the fundamental laws of nature. I know this sounds like most of the hero tales ever told, but this is the original. The very first of the man-child god-hero genre. Here is the birth of…
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It’s March 2019 and I’m helping Jake load four full drum kits out of his van and back into storage. He tells me, “Samba is definitely the way forward. I realised it after the last protest we both did playing those two djembes. It wasn’t enough. With Samba drums you can march. Everyone can hear…
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Right now, large-scale and systematic destruction of the natural living world – ecocide – is legally permitted. Current regulations simply do not stop the scale of harm we are witnessing play out across the planet. Climate litigation (suing) may result in compensation, but it cannot prevent dangerous industrial activity from continuing. We believe ecocide…
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