Monthly Archives: March 2023

What I think, What I've Been Doing

The Climate Crisis Will Be Televised Trivially

A screenshot of me sitting in church on local news on the evening of 8th March 2023. Caption reads “Lloyd Davis, Community Worker, Guildford United Reformed Church”

We got a call just after 10:30am on Wednesday from ITN saying that they had a film crew in Guildford reporting on the overnight snow and wondering whether they could come and film at our Warm Hub.

In the late summer, you know when we had a change of monarch and several prime ministers and for all the reasons it was becoming clear that fuel prices were about to go up very quickly and probably stay there, we decided to open our doors every weekday morning during the winter (very loosely November to March) for anyone who might need warmth either physical or metaphorical. Lots of people were talking about it at the time and that got crystallised into the #WarmWelcome movement and Surrey County Council put some funding towards supporting “Warm Hubs”. We didn’t care much about the branding, though it was nice to have the funding. As it’s turned out, for many reasons, most of which we can only speculate about, few people came for help (here and in other hubs around the county) but those who have done have really appreciated it.

Anyway, that’s not today’s story, that’s just something you need to know because I’ve been naughty and not writing here as much as I should have. If I were the natural-born blogger that sometimes people say I am, you’d be sick of hearing about this by now.

So I said yes of course (just say yes!) but couldn’t guarantee whether anyone would still be there when the crew turned up. There were a few people in the foyer and we were doing our dementia-friendly Sunflower Café in the sanctuary. They did come quite soon afterwards (two women carrying all the kind of kit that you’d expect for proper grown-up TV, not like those social media amateurs you get these days!) and we chatted and gave them tea and then I did a little interview and the camera operator got some B-roll and then they also interviewed some of the people at the café about how they were dealing with the cold weather. Everyone was very polite, as Guildford people are, and answered the questions without revealing what’s really going on.

Because really, who wants to go on TV and say “oh it’s miserable, I’m having a terrible time, can’t afford to keep warm, can’t afford to eat, and my life-partner, who I’ve loved to bits for fifty years, has dementia and needs constant attention… but it’s great that I can come here and have a free cup of tea and some biscuits and maybe some advice on how to save energy.”

It was easier for me because a) I’m not in the same predicament; b) I have a job title to hide behind; c) I’ve always got lots to say when asked; d) we had a similar media request before Christmas and I prepped some talking points then.

All the same I did end up rambling a bit about how “isolation” means something different for rich people in Surrey versus poor people in inner cities, but the bit that made it to broadcast was me saying “It’s just been grey and it’s felt like the sun’s not gonna come back and that just has a massive effect on everybody’s mental health, both in terms of feeling a bit down but also just feeling tired.”

My mug, used as an illustration for the “hot tea” served at church.
It has the slogan “Keep Calm And Play The Ukulele”

After another cup of tea and stocking up on custard creams, they left us to visit the gritting depot.

I was left feeling really sorry for them, dashing around town in the cold, trying to tell a story out of all of this, for an early evening TV audience who probably get up after the main news to put the kettle on. And what’s the story? It snowed and it was cold but people, being people, just got on with their days – those that can, had fun; those that have jobs to do, did their jobs. My suspicion/prejudice is that the demographic that watches ITV local news mostly couldn’t have fun in the snow and probably don’t have jobs.

This link might break soon, I don’t know how long they keep this sort of thing up for, but looking at the resulting 2m18s of film made me think of the mirror-image, the news items we get in the summer, the ones that go “oh blimey, isn’t it hot?!” and show a bunch of pink English people in the park and someone trying to deal with molten tarmac before cutting to a warning to be careful near water. At what point do we stop doing this? I mean, stop treating these weirder weather patterns as comic/tragic filler between the “real” news and the early evening soaps. No it’s not unheard of for us to have snow in early March, but what I said about it feeling that the sun isn’t coming back is unusual and it comes on the back of earlier winter months when it felt like it was never going to stop raining and then the summer last year when it felt like it was never going to rain again. That’s the description of climate change that feels closest to my direct experience.

It leaves me thinking about what media we *could* be making about what’s really going on, so I guess that’s why I seem to be blogging again.

What I've Been Doing

At Work In The Ruins, Dougald Hine, 2023

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ruins-os-status
“How do we give Spiritual Health the same status as Physical Health?” a session called at an Open Space on Infrastructures of Care, in response to “At Work In The Ruins”.
London, 8th February, 2023

This week, I’ve finished reading Dougald’s excellent book. (also on Audible, read by the author). I don’t really do book reviews – this is more some initial notes after reading.

The book’s subtitle is “Finding Our Place in the Time of Science, Climate Change, Pandemics and All the Other Emergencies” so yeah, “all the *other* emergencies”.

I’ve tried talking about this as the “global polycrisis” in my day job at church – lol. It’s clear to me that we need better ways to make sense of this because we think we’re good in a crisis, that it brings out the best in us, but what we’re seeing now is a seemingly never-ending series of crises and while it *does* bring out good, it doesn’t feel like anyone can keep it up much longer.

It’s a hard word for people to get their heads round, polycrisis, and my explanation (that it’s all the things that we see stacking up in the news every day, while recognising that they’re all interconnected and that the complexity that therefore arises is only going to make for more surprising and potentially horrible events that we keep perceiving as individual crises <breathe!>) doesn’t always help.

Dougald’s book is a wander through many more of the things that are hard for people to get their heads around. It looks at some explanations for how we got here, some critiques of the current ways of looking at the problems we face and some ideas for how to move forward without minimising or continuing to deny the trouble we’re in.

The first two of these cover the period/era/machine/ideology that he refers to as ‘modernity’. So you get to dive into what (or who!) modernity is and how it’s affected the way we think and behave. It is the impending ruins after the end of modernity that the title refers to.

It’s still working it’s way through me, even though I’ve been lucky enough , through my friendship with Dougald, to have been immersed in many of the concepts in the book while he was forming them and writing about them.

I want to lay out here some of the core things that I noticed as I made my way through the book. Lots of reviewers have noted that it’s a poetic piece as well as being a well-crafted argument so some motifs do pop up throughout as the narrative builds and this helped me both to consolidate what I was learning, but also to see how my thinking was being changed.

Predicaments – this was a biggie for me. It refers to John Michael Greer‘s idea of the difference between a predicament and a problem (that a problem has a solution whereas a predicament is something you have to live with and hopefully find better ways of doing so) – it came up many times to remind me that the “problems” that so many of us are trying to “solve” are actually unsolvable predicaments and that all of these are facets of modernity.

“the price others have been paying all along” – one of the rearrangements in my brain that needs to be reinforced is to shake off the idea that “we” (ie people like me) are the only ones who matter. I mean of course, right? But it’s embedded in so much thinking and it also echoes Vinay’s line that “collapse means us having the same standard of living as the people who grow our coffee.” This was a good reminder that whatever we have to go through, much of our comfort still comes at the expense of other people in other parts of the world.

“people who work in places like that” – this generally means people who work in government or public policy. It’s the people who produce policies and statements and thought leadership and other bullshit that claims to improve the world and be “part of the solution” but in reality keeps working against all of our interests. It’s the people who work in places that support the propping up of modernity. I’ve been one of those people and saw myself in the phrase “Those involved in policymaking now thought of themselves as pragmatic technocrats”. It’s a bit of my work (from the nineties) that I need to revisit and think through in the light of where we find ourselves now.

“no left turn” – this helped me reframe my view of my own political activism and how I’ve thought about the world since I was first shaken by exposure to Marxist analysis. There’s a nagging part of me that wants the answer to this whole thing to be socialist revolution but especially since 2015/16 I’ve been as uncomfortable with the certainties of my friends on the left as with those of the people we stand against. This is not to say that we shouldn’t oppose vehemently the policies of the current UK government but we also can’t continue to pick our enemies or bedfellows solely on where they sit on the traditional left/right axis.

Small path(s) – in contrast to the “big path” which is the road we’re on when we imagine that large-scale efforts (even if organised at a small- or even individual-scale) will create a sustainable version of the world which can continue as it has been all along. Often using technologies that haven’t actually been invented yet. It’s the “business as usual, but sustainable at any cost” mindset. I felt reassured that the work I’ve been doing in the last five years, at a local level, building community capacity and the sorts of relationships that ought to be more resilient no matter how poorly the big path solutions serve us. It’s helping me to let go of the fear that in coming here and working in a small-town church I was doing the equivalent of (in Dougald’s words) moving to Devon and retraining as an acupuncturist.

So yeah.

The image above comes from an Open Space that I organised with Liz Slade at Unitarian HQ to welcome Dougald back to London at the beginning of his UK launch tour in February. It was just one of many conversations inspired by the ideas in the book on the day, but there are many, many more to come. I’m looking forward to opening more space to talk about them.