Wind on water

Over the wide sea
flies a wind, brushing, curving,
a swift with dark wings.

Sopelana, November 2011

The power of silence

Born and bred in this alpine village, nineteen year old Mehdi lost his life at work through a typically brave and generous act. During a routine cleaning of the silo in the woodwork shop, he saw his two young companions in trouble, leaped in to help them and was tragically buried under a mass of collapsing sawdust.

The entire resident population of the village turned out for the young man’s memorial service, some fifteen hundred people filling the narrow street that ascended the hill by the little stone church. A late autumn sun gave warmth to the scene as we waited in silence while the rites were performed.

Afterwards, a way was left clear for the cortège to pass, led by a mountain rescue vehicle with Mehdi’s two fire helmets displayed on the bonnet. Here youngsters like Mehdi join up in their teens for the volunteer fire service. A keen skier, he was also a member of the mountain rescue team and his colleagues were there to pay him honour, lining the road with their trained rescue dogs on leashes.

Something remarkable was present in our gathering. The silence. A silence in which some higher spirit seemed to breathe. The very quietness emphasised the strength and dignity of these teams, who stand by to deal with emergencies of every kind that the mountains deliver. They are used to dealing with tragedies, risking their own lives to save others and to retrieve victims, often in the worst conditions. Mehdi himself was a living expression of this community ethos and as he grew up, took his place in their ranks.

I have always admired mountain people and the habitual, daily strength they develop, living in these beautiful places which hold so many dangers. There is a dramatic tension in those opposites: splendour and danger. Therein, “a terrible beauty is born”, as Yeats put it.

In silence, the beauty appears.

CJM

As water falls

Mere sound of water
upon stone, stone on water,
sounding water, stone.

Lutour, summer 2011

Cascade blown aside
flies not falls, is vapour now,
a moment only.

Pyrenees, summer 2011

Homage to water

Wet sands, slipping waves,
where rims of water trace each
pebble's geometry.

La Vega, summer 2011

The moving shadow
of a cloud sails dark and free
across the ocean.


Llanes, summer 2011

Watching water

We all love to do it. Watching water in flow captivates us with its infinite variety of movement. We go miles to see a waterfall. We picnic by a mountain stream. Something deeply instinctual lies at the heart of our relationship with water, above all in its natural environment.

Yet, as a direct result of our own criminal carelessness, humanity, over the next fifty years, will almost certainly experience an acute shortage of fresh water for consumption and irrigation. And this, together with a surfeit of sea water, as ocean levels rise. Both of these problems arise from squandering, mismanaging and generally abusing the one vital resource without which life on Earth is impossible.

While the problem of water shortage will be huge for countries already facing progressive desertification, by 2050 it will be problematic even for countries such as Switzerland where shrinking glaciers are reducing the storage and replenishment required for a steady water supply. In their turn, Greece, southern Spain, and wide tracts of Australia and south America are threatened by falling river levels and rising salinity in groundwater resulting from poor land and river management.

A deeper understanding of water is essential for our survival, and not just water as a chemical compound (which in itself is mysterious), but in its cycles and behaviour in relation with the rest of nature. We also need to recognise water as a carrier of life and memory. Sensitive studies show that it bears the imprint of what it travels over and through, and “remembers” the influences that are brought to bear on it. Here I am thinking of the studies of researchers like the Japanese Masaru Emoto, Andreas Schulz in Tübingen, Germany, the Herrischried Institute in the Black Forest, and others.

What is at stake here, where the boundaries of current science and technology fade into more subtle realms, is the issue of water quality. The “organics” of the future will have to pay close attention to the intimate link between water quality, food quality and human health, as the fertility of our productive lands deteriorates even further. Anecdotal evidence sugggests that irrigation water proceeding from hydroelectric and desalination plants lacks the generative power of water that has passed through a natural cycle.

Pioneers in water quality research include the Austrian forester Viktor Schauberger, the flow expert Theodor Schwenk and the inventor of the Flowform John Wilkes, who died in March this year. In each case, their wisdom – and warnings of future disaster – arose from closely observing water and its behaviour in the style of research which the eighteenth century poet and scientist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe called “delicate empiricism”.

Goethe also referred to water as “the blood of the earth”, a phrase picked up by the title of Allerd Stikker’s book on water resources, an account which ends with the poetic declaration, "Seeing water, being water, I feel part of Creation. I am not alone."

In the same spirit of “seeing”, I will continue to drop into this blog my own occasional close observations on water, in haiku form, as homage to water.

CJM

A shocking headline

After my rapturous comments on the Barcelona team win the other day, I must pin my colours to the mast. I'm a Roger Federer fan and have never in my life anguished or triumphed with any other sportsman/woman in quite the same way.

So you can imagine my horror to see the recent newspaper headline: Is the Mighty Fed in Decline? I quickly scanned the article, and was relieved to find that it had nothing to do with the Supreme Sportsman. It was about the slipping of power away from the US Federal Reserve Bank, obliged for the first time in this difficult world to explain its actions to the American public.

CJM

No Other Gods Before Me

‘Thou shalt have no other gods before me.’ (Exodus 20) Such was the admonition of the God of the Old Testament, a god who, Nietzsche confidently told us, is now dead. But as we know, natura abhorrat vacuum, and there is strong evidence throughout human history that worship is wired into our genes. What then, has come to replace God as the object of our veneration and sacrifice? Why, ‘It’s the Economy, stupid!’ as Bill Clinton was reputed to have pinned up on the wall of the Oval Office.

Once you look closely, the similarities between religious belief and economic belief are frighteningly similar – in the same way that some ingenious commentator found striking parallels between George W. Bush and the Taliban leader Mullah Omar.

To begin with, the actual practice of economics relies on unquestioned dogma which is founded on the pattern: A (advisor to the present government) learnt it from B who is now safely in a zimmer frame, who learnt it from C, who has long been dead.

This sequence of transmission, ensuring that current economic policy will always be out of date and ineffective, was pointed out to me when I was a young journalist covering summits in Paris. It was satisfying later to find the same theory applied to scientific revolutions in general by Thomas Kuhn. The crux of his thinking was that a couple of generations of academics had to die off before there could be any significant change in the current ‘paradigms’ (for which read ‘dogmas’). In the case of religious institutions (of whatever stripe), we are talking of rather more generations, of course.

A further similarity with religion exists in that fundamental economic concepts (while purporting to be scientific) have no basis in reason. Take, for instance, a key tenet of economic policy: ‘sustainable growth’. Already back in the late 1970’s Albert A. Bartlett, professor at Boulder, Colorado, argued cogently that those who believed in indefinite growth were the modern-day equivalent of Flat-Earthers. Even earlier, Kenneth Boulding, JFK’s environmental adviser is quoted (New Statesman) as saying: ‘Anyone who believes in indefinite growth in anything physical, on a physically finite planet, is either mad – or an economist.’ And has anything changed since then?

What we see around us, as practised by our leaders internationally, is a version of the Emperor’s New Clothes so far removed from sanity that it makes one roll one’s eyes. The barometers of GNP, the measure of the output we generate as a nation, and thus supposedly of our wellbeing, have in practice no bearing on the quality of our lives. As has often been pointed out, the commercial activity stimulated by a major disaster shows up as a positive in economic statistics. The levelling of the Amazonian rainforest for the production and export of soya adds a huge plus to Brazil’s balance of payments. Short-term exploitation and consumption rule because these are what, on the current model, the Economy demands so as to 'thrive'.

So this is the new religion. Our god Economy will be lord over all. He/she must never be upset and to this end must be kept 'stable' and 'sound'.  A depressed Economy will be unhappy, and so every effort must be made to stimulate him/her if this is the case. But beware, equally, of overheating, this makes the god very uncomfortable and even menacing. If this arises, all of us have to tighten our belts in an act of propitiation. Sacrifices must then be made.

But at what human cost? Here our leaders seem to take Inca kings as their role models, in terms of the human victims needed for the appeasement of the god Economy. We have it straight from the lips of the great Labour reformer, Anthony Giddens, who was adviser to Tony Blair at that crucial moment when we still believed in a Third Way and may even have voted for a theoretical kind of socialism with a human face. Years later, Giddens, writing in The Independent in 2007, expressed the article of faith beyond doubt: ‘Ensure the economy is strong. Securing greater social justice depends upon a robust economy, not the other way around.’

Ah, so bring on the Five Year Plan, move the peasants into the factories, house the ignorant b--s in thirty-storey tower blocks. Social justice will follow, inevitably.

No, there was no Third Way; there never was. Even Giddens admits he had stopped using the phrase because it was 'so widely misconstrued'. Ironically, the financial institutions were already on the road to their almighty crash (and our ruin) even as Giddens wrote that piece in praise of chancellor Brown and his 'sound' economic management. We were lured into the temple of progress, only to find ourselves worshipping and grovelling to the same old god, Economy. The priesthood, which is to say, the bankers, continue to stand in their pious protected circle, and intone the same old anthems.

CJM