December 6th 1813: Byron writes in his diary:

"This journal is a relief. When I am tired - as I generally am - out comes this, and down goes everything..... I have just thrown a poem into the fire (which has re-lighted to my great comfort), and I have smoked out of my head the plan for another. I wish I could as easily get rid of thinking."

For many years I have been an indefatigable note taker. The extent of it causes my head to spin, and as the years role by it gets worse, not better. In this emptiest of empty worlds, paradoxically my curiosity constantly expands - though I do draw the line at Formula One. And even then I am curious as to why people continue to follow it, forever on the look out for the moment of breakthrough when spectators crash the barriers, not the cars.

Despite having a pocket computer, I still have several notebooks on the go and which I try to keep separate. A keyboard cannot match the spontaneity of a pen, and when, for example, looking through a microscope at a hatching butterfly egg, a note book and a Biro is undoubtedly the more flexible and appropriate tool. And when depressed, to scribble pain on a page is about all one can manage to do.

Notwithstanding my best efforts to keep topics apart, one subject constantly threatens to spill over into another. Whenever I do this I make a mental note of the fact - and then forget where I have buried it, only for it to take me by surprise later, and when I least expect it. This note taking is a whirlpool of impressions, facts and opinions that constantly threatens to drag me under. But how to order this material? Should I even try to do so? Shouldn’t I just let it roll and roll and accept that all attempts to impose a discrete ordering undermines the spirit of this note taking and is not really me in any case? Anything less fails to show how I arrive at my ideas and diminishes me as a person. Moreover, I firmly believe those who can narrow things down, are able to do so only because they lead a narrower life. So why not push things to extremes and see what comes up, for capitalism, more than ever before, is now a total culture requiring a total response? And I did let rip - only to find I was drowning in the flow. The following is like some compressed file put together around what I initially wrote, constructed from the building blocks of the far-flung note taking – and which still needs opening.....

Nature diaries ------ and

We were only eight years old when we first started to keep nature diaries (c/f “Mabey Baby” also on the RAP web). We had moved from a small railway halt in Co Durham on the fringes of a vast industrial estate that during the Second World War had produced armaments. To disguise it from the air, the armaments factories had been covered in spoil and clinker taken from local pit heaps and blast furnaces. As very young children this was to be our playground, farmers’ fields and country lanes unable to offer anything like the same enticements. And so was born in us the combined love of nature and industrial wasteland which has never left us and that we still regard as home. From a very early age we knew we were more likely to find skylarks, flocks of lapwings and gold finches on the heaped-over factories than in the surrounding countryside. Still in primary school, our hearts and minds were flung open to an “industrial pantheism”, experiencing in places that were then, and still are, regarded as eyesores, a profound, unforgettable sensation of connectedness. On these wastes intermingled with tarred railway sleepers, rusting rails, forgotten boilers and half demolished brick huts, nature teemed effortlessly. And we knew which industrial workers to trust and who would come down to our level, remembering, perhaps, that sites like these had also once been their playground. Looking back these men, who were sometimes setting snares, also helped increase our powers of observations.

This expansiveness diminished somewhat amid the soot and grime of the West Riding of Yorkshire. Sad to say only one diary survives from that time. But leafing through it, whether in the shape of disused quarries, railway sidings or mill yards, the presence of industry is always there as a backdrop. I was particularly struck by the evocative power of one entry that reads: “Sat 15th Jan 1954. At half past nine it started snowing. It was a very silent day, not a tree stirred”. Otherwise the diary is memorable for its documenting of butterflies not known to be then present in industrial West Yorkshire, like the common blue and meadow brown. Brought to the attention of Yorkshire naturalists only in the last ten years, these observations dating from the early 1950s indirectly led to the discovery of a remarkable colony of grayling in Healey Mills MarshallingYards in lower Calderdale during 2003.

Though sporadically at first, sometime in the late eighties and after a lapse of three decades, I began to keep a nature diary once more. Whenever I wish to refer back to then, invariably I cannot immediately put my finger on what I am looking for, having first to wade through a mass of other material. I therefore resolved to keep a notebook specifically devoted to observations in the field. So every time I go out, mainly in pursuit of butterflies, I record the exact date and quickly note down other details. Stacked on a shelf are fourteen volumes of notes that have been thrown down in massive haste in case I forget a detail that may eventually turn out to be of some significance. To say the least these tatty volumes make for disjointed reading. However their lack of premeditation is a welcome release from the bane of considered writing.

To these notebooks another has been added entitled “anatomical details”, although the varying degrees of magnification provided by the microscope allows me to observe and photograph everything from living butterfly eggs to a single scale from a butterfly’s wing. The number of prior entries extend from August 2006 to August 2007, the last entry detailing a magnificent derive we took through Grimsby docks. There is the same rapid fire, staccato delivery as in my nature diaries: “a sunken boat, its funnel projecting from the water - a shop with a sign on which is painted “ice and ocean”- in the window a chandelier and a pair of rubber gloves - a rowing boat on a mound of earth with starlings resting on the rim, on closer inspection only half a boat as if sawn in two – on the prow of this part boat someone had recently sprayed ‘Gemma’ - the Jubilee Café - a black wooden hut - behind it a small stove with a tall chimney some 8ft high - plastic chairs and a mean table. In fact there were chairs to be found all over the docks left just as quayside workers had left them. No one ever tidied them away. The strangeness and emptiness of it – opposite the Jubilee Café a failed installation made from a disused dockside crane - to one side a broken down planter covered in Canadian fleabane from which soil was spilling out onto the road- on the top a discarded brief case - magnificent, cryptic concrete structures now abandoned - huge frame-less windows rising above the docks like empty cinema screens peering onto nothing and with no audience - a couple of turnstones hopping about – their quick, jerky gait was markedly more hurried than the flock on the tiered breakwater on the approach to Cleethorpes- the sudden transition from freshwater to saline plants - mugwort then sea purslane and spurrey – and as for the insect life - could it be almost as good as England’s rainforest… and more likely to survive because the place will be saved from the scorched earth of gentrification unlike the Thames Estuary? After all N. E. Lincs is a fragment cut off from any real post modern development; a land that neo liberal time forgot.

Over the years the details have tended to uncouple and become less focussed on butterflies and habitat as the world forced its blanket attention upon us. I wonder too if the hopes we had invested in a resolution of the class struggle had not now been transferred onto nature and that the struggle for nature is obliged to take on anti capitalist perspective, the issue of an anti-statist autonomy mattering as much as it did to a lapsed workers' movement. The treatment meted out to us over the fate of the Dingy Skipper on the spoil heaps of South and West Yorkshire was also a requiem to the defeat of the miners' strike and which, by the same token, also sealed the fate hereabouts of this endangered butterfly. To the eternal shame of conservationist bodies, especially Butterfly Conservation and other Dingy Skipper deniers, this holocaust of the species has passed off with never a mention. Thus two linked communities were cleaned off the face of the earth, their memory lingering on in photographs and shaky film footage.

Whenever we took photographs, and latterly film, in the field we endeavoured to capture the small as well as the large, minute detail as well as background. In 2008 the binding polarities were taken to their furthest extremes, when, in a gale on the top of the Langdale Pikes, I succeeded in filming a microscopic close up of the eye and antennae of a mountain ringlet, its “eyelashes” whipped by the wind shaking the butterfly and minutes later a panoramic view from Sergeant Mann, the Langdales’ topmost pinnacle, my tripod tethered down by rocks. All this was hastily scribbled down latter that day, the unearthly fluorescence of the hair moss and lichen tachiste rocks noted and how when gasping for breath, having just ascended Dungeon Gyhll, the mountain landscape appeared to heave as if breathing. This scrawl that passes for writing is not just badly written; it is frequently undecipherable!

Above, top left: Stickle Tarn and Harrison Stickle. Above, top right: Pike of Bliscoe.
Middle, bottom left: Mountain Ringlet sheltering in howling gale, 2008. Middle, bottom right: Eye of the same butterfly.
Bottom, left: Dungeon Ghyll from valley bottom. Bottom, right: Mountain Ringlet on the Langdale summit.

The photographs that we have taken in the field mostly lie unscrutinised, shut away in wallets. Space permitting, they could profit from a greater exposure because over time one begins to notice things, their continual presence becoming less habit forming as if time is required to enable them to release their secret. Propped up on a work surface is a photograph of a oleander hawk moth taken with Notting Hill’s cloud clipping edifice of Trellick Tower in the background. I had imagined to myself how wonderful it must be to encounter the moth resting on vegetation or walls in dusty urban settlements at the base of the Atlas Mountains. And it remained like that until by chance a woman, in recovery from breast cancer, remarked on it and I took down a copy of Skinner’s “Moths of the British Isles” and showed her a plate of hawk moths. We both immediately noted the museum specimen lacked “depth”, that the moth’s top wings appeared much flatter than they did in my photo. Here the wings gave the illusion of an alternating concave and convex undulating surface with a plant like stem running through the top wing, the effect greatly increased by the moths natural resting position than in the splayed out museum specimen. The overall effect was intensely three dimensional and resembled more the skeletal remains of an animals skull that has lain on the ground for some length of time and is already turning mouldy. That or overlaying foliage in which light and dark varies, an effect that has evolved to trick likely predators. I looked at the top wings of other hawk moths and wondered if photographs taken in the field would tell the same story, particularly in the case of the silver striped hawk, striped hawk, spurge hawk and bedstraw hawk, all from warmer climes where a greater adaptation to the starker effects of light and shade would be called for. I then went on to note that the under wings showed less variation throughout the Sphingidae than did the top wings, and that the colours were toward the warm end of the spectrum – red, pink, orange, yellow and more saturated, though broken by two dark bands that followed the outlines of the wing margins and with just the hint of a third more or less parallel to the abdomen. Did these colours and bands have any evolutionary significance, or were they just junk adornment that just happened to gratify our aesthetic sensibilities? In any case it was a rare delight that this one photo glanced at a thousand times but never once really looked at, had triggered such a train of reflection. But could repeated exposure to the same moving images ever do the same, creating insight rather than overwhelming it? Or would one forever remain trapped in the same endless, ground hog, loop screaming for release from a medium becoming ever more invasive and threatening to take over one’s entire personality?

- and the new nature writing -

For some time now there has been talk of a new nature writing which we were contemptuous of from the start. The very idea one should define oneself as a writer has long been bankrupt, despite the many blood transfusions and repeated bailouts that grow ever more desperate, the whole gamut of art being capitalisms' final redoubt. Writing henceforth must remain a mere adjunct to expression, a prelude to action rather than yet more words, words, words. The “new nature writing” aspires to an engagement with reality, but because ecological critique is not wedded to a rigorous critique of capitalism, stays put at a sentimentalising, even deeply conservative, notion of the humanising of nature and its interconnectedness with us. Instead of developing the “Thesis on Feurbach“ by Marx, this drift has led to the reclaiming of Feurbach for ultimately reactionary purposes. In “Crow Country”, Mark Cocker describes the way rooks followed the spread of European farming from the cutting down of the primeval forest to the present day. Though appalled by today’s agi-business, ultimately Coker's tone is resigned and rooks become a symbol of our heritage, and so indirectly the key to our salvation: rookeries were recorded in the Doomsday Book and subsequently regarded as a sign of baronial entitlement.

This engaged approach to nature lived on as a romantic sub culture composed largely of working people to whom the mere passive recording of the facts was an in built anathema, knowing that their chances of a better life depended on practical change. Concurrent with this there was a modernising literary fashion stemming from the Cambridge professor F. R. Leavis linking the practise of poetry to the practise of rural crafts like that of the wheelwright, the whole edifice being predicated on a rejection of industry, the industrial working class and the class struggle that went with it. Though we are spared the embarrassment of the new nature writing breaking into song, some of this attitude still remains though brought up to date by the avant-garde aware Richard Mabey, particularly in his fulsome praise of the wretched eco artist Andy Goldsworthy. More or less intuitively the new nature writers know they must not revive the corpse of romanticism down to the last detail otherwise they will become a laughing stock. The undeniable power of “Crow Country” partly comes from its unconscious assimilation of the revolutionary avant-garde of the first decades of the 20th century, for what we have here is not poetry but the actual poetry of facts. The same goes for Richard Deakins ”Waterlog” and “Wildwood” which though interspersed with quotes from Clare, Ruskin etc, seeks to practise Keats not imitate him. To get to know about pond and river life Deakins would swim in them, “taking part” even more than Keats, it has to be said,“ in the experience of things”. In “Crow Country” the landscape is viewed, at least partially, through non-human eyes.

Yet another example of this budding genre is Phillip Hoare's “Leviathan-or the Whale”. Like so many other works written by natural historians and biologists, we are repeatedly reminded of Kant, as though his imprimatur would, unawares, stamp everything produced after him. What could evoke the Kantian sublime more than when swimming beside a Sperm Whale, Hoare experiences “a sensation of beauty, a feeling of something limitless, unbounded, an almost religious feeling”, and though made to feel small, he cannot rid himself of his (rational?) ego: “I felt insignificant” he says “but not quite”. Hoare is not a natural historian, marine biologist or cetologist by training, having studied English Literature at university.

The two novels that had most impressed him were also ours, both written within four years of each other: Emily Bronte's “Wuthering Heights” and Herman Melville's “Moby Dick”. Though both were written at the height of the novel as the literary genre both anticipated the complete collapse of the novel. In fairness, we would add two others that still excite with possibility: “Tristram Shandy" by Lawrence Sterne at the moment the novel was kicking off in the 18th century and inevitably “Ulysses” and its aftermath in “Finnegan's Wake” by James Joyce in the first few decades of the 20th century both of which finally laid waste to anything promised by the artificial novelistic conceit. (Ever after, the novel has meant absolutely nothing no matter that as a dead form it is more ubiquitous than ever marking a cocooned, reified, dead or dying existence).

Though Hoare refers to “Wuthering Heights” as a novel he never describes “Moby Dick” as one but simply as a book, an omission that is not thought through because not entirely conscious. Hoare perceptively notes the book “stands outside itself from the very start”, weighted with exo-literary minutiae: alongside typical taxonomical details are also weird ones, rather in the same manner Pliny would include descriptions of fabled monsters in his natural histories. Millennia later, natural historians would disdainfully dismiss these apparitions, though logic requires that we begin to accept that the human capacity to imagine is also part of natural history. Now necessitating a radical reappraisal, its meaning has remained unexamined, superseded by the exigencies of scientific method and the need for accurate recording .The book’s legendary beginning “Call me Ishmael” is like the sound of a wave breaking and Ishmael himself is a walking conceit of discordant suggestions, continually “sidestepping his own narrative” and interrupting the reader with “diversions and digressions, pulling him aside with hell fire sermons or musical interludes, with anatomical allegories or sensual dissertations on spermaceti oil”.

Hoare dips in and out of “Moby Dick” becoming “engrossed only for my attention to wander”. We can also pick up “Wutherings Heights” and more or less open it at random in a way one cannot do with the historical novels of a Tolstoy or Balzac, for here time frames reign supreme. In these two books the form of the novel, though only two centuries old, is – as previously pointed out - already breaking down, their extraordinary power residing in this formal dissolution. Though there is a narrative structure, it is also one we help create and personal to each of us, time coming to something of a standstill in these two seminal contraries of the novel. Hoare half grasps he is the beyond of “Moby Dick” but never quite. Human beings are absent from his evocation of a pre-lapsarian world as is also a critique of art: “it was as if human kind never happened, as if the ocean had reverted to another Eden”. The worry is that in bringing to light an endangered world in which, as oceans warm and the food supply of whales dwindle, there is no space for man. We are hardly at the beginning of this development that could eventually turn into the horror of horrors.

Moby Dick” especially began slowly to obsess the growing revolution of modern art in the first few decades of the 20th century though nothing like to the extent of what was to succeed it - the modern art of revolution – which still remains to be realised. And wasn't it so because the book deals with so much in a wide ranging, even disconnected, passionate totality which constantly leaps out of the pages and sentences in a call for imaginative activity and action? Inevitably it gave rise to Charles Olsen's perceptive theorising about Melville which complimented the American beat lifestyle and action painting of the 1950s though rather more coherently than the recuperative, often tired, artistic limitations these movements entailed. Nearly four decades later and Loren Goldner was to add further extensive reflections to this wide ranging critique instigated by the quest that was Melville's life and the expression of that complex, wild experience. In fact Goldner in his “Herman Melville: Between Charlemagne & the Antemosaic Cosmic Man” was able to to formulate an original and sensitive critique of the present failure of social revolution in the continent of North America. The essence of Melville particularly as expressed through “Moby Dick” means such cavalier interpretation is wholly in keeping with the spirit of the original and doesn't feel one iota out of place. (Needless to say the academic pantheon around Melville memorabilia will have none of this and Loren Goldner was forced to publish his contribution through his own auspices - something we are entirely familiar with and the 'new' nature writers are not!) The fact that “Moby Dick” is now being placed high up in the pre-history of eco critique may bode well though if the raw urgency of imaginative action which is the very heart of “Moby Dick” isn't emphasised it may also prove to be nothing more than another dead end. For let's face it: most action proposed by even the better part of the ecos falls well short of the basic trajectory needed, hidebound by statist perspectives and professional status meaning infinite reforms of the present system of capitalist accumulation encountering moral duty is the only game in town. But first a few asides......

It is time to get down, dirty and very personal. Overtime, the records I have kept of butterfly jaunts, though always dashed down with an eye to other details, also include accounts of brief encounters in the field. These have, we believe, a tendency to turn more impassioned than at any other time since the mid 1600s, an upside down world producing a nature turned upside down. This development is so momentous it’s best not to dwell on it too much since it can tip a person into insanity. Suffice to say that birders are more conscious of it than lepidopterists because of the mass decline of summer migrants. The annual migration of five billion birds between Africa and Europe is on the scale of the Gulf Stream or Indian monsoon. As regular as clockwork they arrive and depart – or rather once did. All “new nature writing” is aware of impending eco collapse. What is substantially less obvious in this writing is the extent of capitalist induced social collapse that destroys not just the complex irreproducibility of the planetary ecosystem, but personal relationships as well.

Apart from a meticulously kept nature diary and sporadic entries arising out of the building scene, there are countless pages of tortured stuff recording the messy details of breakdowns following failed relationships with the opposite sex, the kind of thing one doesn’t want others to read, is embarrassing to re-read but also contains moments of insight so naked, intensely private and self revelatory that only the heart of darkness can unlock. Am I forever to be denied a companion prepared to put up with the rigours of fieldwork? Both Mabey and Cocker have endured quite severe depressives episodes but theirs is not an expression of the all-round hopelessness the approaching end of human time is bound to produce. In Cocker's case we feel in the background the comforting presence of domestic orthodoxy and it is difficult to escape the conclusion his unfailing crows are a continuation of time-honoured ritual, both human and animal: “Crow Country” is as motionless as socio-biology gets. How different my life has been, how ripped apart in comparison because more open to experiment and a yearning for total change. I wonder too if my fondness for the wild life havens of industrial dereliction over countryside canons, means my experiences and outlook are indelibly marked by relationships forged in the melting pot of the inner cities and which I genuinely believe, though fragmentary and courting the non-existent, are superior, when all is said and done, to ones based on more traditional premises. If the human race is to have a future, this is the way forward, not least because it breaks the reproductive spell of a planet now threatening a holocaust of children so dreadful as to end forever the desire for reproductive success.

Building work notebooks and the

displacing of writing, music and

nature

Two years ago in 2007 I remember sitting in a garden with others and all of us at the end of our tether because we were unable to plastically realise the building dream of the woman who owned this darned house. It was an old 19th century house with all ceilings and walls on the piss, the mortar between the bricks being little more than dust. We had made a large kitchen out of three rooms each with different ceiling levels and walls that did not read through and so had to be evened out. We had just about made a silk purse out of a sows ear, as we, in desperate need of reassurance, told ourselves over and over again, and given the subsidence, a better job was not possible. Yet it did not meet with approval because the by now passé, energy wasteful, halogen head lights were literally millimetres out in some places. We were made to feel incompetent chancers and we were on the verge of jacking the job when my eye was drawn to a piece on John Coltrane written by the Guardian’s music critic John Fordham in which this musicologist for the first and last time excelled himself:

“Coltrane's huge yearning tone, sermonising intensity and revolutionary technique allowed him to sound like several saxophonists rolled into one, but for all that he always sounded as if striving for what still lay out of reach. It wasn't just the search for more music, or a different music, It sounded like the search for another world or another life” (13.7.07).

Jack Kerouac had also written brilliantly on Lester Young but this was different because it hinted at the transcendence of music. But would the great ‘Trane have ended on a building site like we had, dreaming of a far, far better world whilst being hounded by a pernickety client whose ideal of building were the bleak interiors of Canary Wharf and who went off to work looking like a prostitute in a see through dress, the better to sell properties to rich overseas buyers? Pushed to these extremes, temperatures rise and analysis grows razor sharp, each sally, in this mounting crescendo of insight, prompting an even smarter response, a carpenters pencil and scrap of paper torn from an open bag of plaster, all there is to note down some of the choicest turns of phrase, and then only very infrequently, the inspired bon mots mangled, because written down much later when the writing hand is free. Forget bad writing - like a latter day cuneiform, it hardly qualifies as writing at all. Nor is it apparently good building work either, and we would leave work resembling more a wart-covered toad than a human being. I was reminded of a passage from Lautreamont that could have been written especially for us, with the days events in mind:

“I cast a long look of satisfaction upon the duality that composes me ----I find myself beautiful! Beautiful as the congenital malformation of man’s sexual organs – or - as the fleshy wattle, conical in shape, furrowed by quite deep transversal wrinkles, which arises from the base of the turkey upper beak”;

or rather as the following truth:

“The system of scales, modes, and their harmonic series does not rest upon invariable natural laws but is, on the contrary, the result of aesthetic principles which have varied with the progressive development of mankind, and will vary again”;

and “above all like an iron clad turreted corvette”. The reference to music could have been lifted word for word from a then current textbook, though hardly a standard one. Again it is a vivid demonstration of Lautreamont's magpie-like clashing together of unrelated material whose bizarre possibilities for good and evil also reflect a cock-eyed totality out there, one in the process even than of becoming misshapen, phantasmagoric and very ominous.

I greatly regret that I did not keep a more thorough diary of the building sites we have known over the past 35 years. For working at the coal face of the property boom was, looking back, an extraordinarily rich experience and had this personal record been more complete, had I thrown down literally everything that came into my head, for every piece of fiction appearing in estate agents descriptions, in government statistics, in economic analyses or in trade union records I could have substituted a real story. So I often have to rely on memory to fill in the gaps, like the bricklayer who saw rise up in front of him on Dartmoor, a brick wall of vast proportions reaching to the cloud base. Or another brickie who was back living in his parents’ council accommodation, his own house seized by his aspirational, estranged wife who had married him for his building skills and taken out an injunction against him, prohibiting him from seeing his kid. To cope with his depression he would stare for hours into his parents’ aquarium and try for all he was worth to think himself a fish with a memory span of less than two seconds. That way he could forget his wife and child. We were often struck by the way builders, particularly those with general building skills, commanded a premium in the marriage market, complimenting that of an endlessly rising property market. They were in fact Gasoline Alley’s new rock stars and could marry up, if they chose to, but only on condition they became aggressively more entrepreneurial

Many years ago we worked with a couple of ex-Catholic Irish lads from Belfast who had been laid off with some reasonable redundancy from the Harland and Wolfe shipyards. They had no wish to ever become sub contractors and were dating a pair of lasses from the all girl pop group Bananarama, then just breaking into the charts. Naïve colleens though the girls were, it was inevitable they would be swallowed whole by the music industry and would in turn spit out their Irish chippies. Years later we saw one of them, now a broken man, on his own and talking to himself. He had become a subcontractor, addicted, like a moth to a flame, to frequenting the rock musicians’ hangout, the Horley Arms, in Camden Lock. With property on its ass, building merchants are suffering as never before, B&Q advertising its wares to the accompaniment of a thirty year old former hit single by – Bananarama! Hardly back to where they started from, though, more's the pity.

Sometimes a record of events related as much to nature as to building. During the total eclipse of the 1990s we were working on a boat moored in the Thames. As the midday sky began to darken we stopped working, noting how under Battersea Bridge the mallards began to roost, some tucking their heads beneath their wings. Out in midstream on an empty Thames barge, a dozen herons became as eerily motionless as their ornamental tin counterparts. As the moment of totality approached, corks popped, and the inevitable rockets launched, the crowd gathered on the embankment breaking into applause. During the last eclipse in the 1920s, in the little Pennine town of Giggleswick then directly in the path of the eclipse, people had fallen on their knees. Which was worse, we wondered, religious dread or natures' grandest spectacles become a performance to be cheered and clapped at?

- Nature as merely another media circus -

The immense contemporary problem for us and the essential one we have to deal with is the passive consumption of nature; nature as something to be viewed, as simple entertainment; a nature X Factor to be switched on and off as we surf with boredom; an hour long TV spectacular between soaps, football results and late night pornography, and all relating to the omnipotence of money. It is nature as spectator sport celebrating an absent life, something which isn't practised let alone something we immerse ourselves in or consciously live with. We delight in the discovery of a miniature, multi-coloured parrot in an undiscovered rain forest while killing the dull little black beetle scurrying across our sterile carpets bought with a 30% discount from Dunelm or Allied Carpets. Keats exhortation in the early 19th century to seek out "negative capability" which by now should have flowered on a mass scale with the concept deepened magnificently - meaning a large amount of us would now have some idea what it is like to be a bat or a beetle - has virtually disappeared without trace.

It as though some horrible, benighted recognition that should never have seen the light of day has been born within us like a Maldorean monster which says nature is dying, if not already dead and so fucking what for at least we have the compensation of celebrity culture. Or, if not that, at the very least celebrities will save the planet as they engage in saving everything else. It's a realisation intimating that the final extinction has already taken place and from now on a dying nature can only be catalogued and filed away tucked into an eternal one thousand gigabyte yellow folder drifting endlessly in cyberspace as we hasten ever faster to our final encounter with stardust.

Everything is circumscribed by an all powerful fatalism blithely masquerading as its exact opposite heralding the era of the living museum; of a pickled in aspic nature inseparable from a living sculpture intertwined with each other forever! It is the era of a spurious radical nature as permanent gallery exhibit writ large; a space to be charged for by every visiting, cloned consumer replete with officious aesthete police touting a disposition of silent, supine worship.

We are still at the early stages of the financialization of nature. That eco artists are without a doubt the emissaries of this process was clearly evident from the recent “Radical Nature” exhibition in the Barbican Centre in London during the summer of 2009. The exhibition's mast head was a field of wheat planted and harvested in Battery Park at the tip of Lower Manhattan in 1982. Called simply “Wheatfield - a Confrontation” it is now famous, but it would be in a far better world if it was now regarded as infamous - with the essential proviso 'infamous' for the right reasons. The fact that the wheatfield was planted on land worth $4.5 billion neatly disguised another totally ignored fact that it has to be the most value-added wheat field in history. The harvested grain travelled to 25 cities around the world in an exhibition called the “International art show for the end of world hunger” organised by the Museum of Minnesota. Superficially a protest against the crudest, most blatant, form of commerce, it raised the prospect of an art farming in which crops can be valorised according to whether they are labelled art or not. The artist, Agnes Denes, has been able to live off it ever since and was indeed “recreating the work on a scrap of forgotten land in industrial East London" as an associate editor of the New Scientist put it (15th August 2009), insensible to the way the recreation was being used to greenwash the Olympiad site and increase real estate values. What other farmer in history has lived off the proceeds of a two acre wheat field for well over a quarter of a century? The artistically modified seeds were carried away by people who planted them in many parts of the world and, given time, Guggenheim Seed PLC may come to rival Montsanto. However we can be certain of one thing: AM seeds will be a lot more expensive than GM seeds – and far harder to combat.

Truth about nature must also be denied like never before in a kind of strange oscillation between depressing fact and a euphoric make believe about the future as nature is aestheticised from all quarters. It has been said recently by the media in general in the slightly better, climate-wise spring and summer of 2009 in the UK that we have had a glorious year for insect activity. A brief respite, a slight rally, has been hyped beyond all cognisances of even minimal truths. On the simplest of levels, any nondescript, casual observer will tell you in comparison to the buddleia bushes of even ten years ago the florets are empty of the pollinators which, in their turn, were empty in comparison to the late 1980s and so on as we travel backwards in time. One example will suffice: a few photographs, well courted by the media, portray a pretty picture of eight or so Heath Fritillary butterflies resting on a frond of bracken in East Blean Woods near Canterbury thus merely sharpening the appalling con we are forced to swallow. Yet none of the official, 'important' lepidopterists and other experts will say anything leading about this for fear of courting pariah status as they eternally look over their shoulders frightened of their shadows and forever hedging their bets.

Above left: The offending super-abundance in East Blean Woods. Above right: The offending butterfly dome.

Indicative of such grovelling toadying, every individual belonging to this crew is singing the praises of that monster of monstrosities; the huge geodesic structure now being built to house the lucky (?) representatives of enough of the world's dying invertebrates near St Albans in Hertfordshire. Nobody even dares murmur that this artificial palace of hospitalised beauty is a sure sign the battle has been lost before the forces have even engaged in resolute skirmishing. Yet this monument to death is clapped, clapped and clapped again. Oh the noise of that joyful din! Yet more than ever this artificial twisting of paradise signifies that the rest of the real environment, even in the vicinity of St Albans – e.g. the vicious widening of the M1 – can go hang.

In a similar vein the London Pestival exhibition on the Southbank artsy/fartsy scene gets bigger and more sophisticated by the year as the combination between artist and insect is gradually made more rounded or rather conical like some aesthetes giant wasp's nest. Aren't we the lucky ones because wasn't it ourselves in Icteric in Newcastle in the mid 1960s who first set the Pilkington father and now latterly son on this path as the figure of Mark Pilkington certainly figures large in this display? Cynics and buffoons will certainly say we blow our own trumpet, yet it is no more than truth still hidden from history! There is little point here going into all the ins and outs suffice to google Pestival to provide yourself with a host of irrelevant details giving some idea what the project is about, though obviously the central, salient facts are missing. In 2009, computer aided design & build took centre stage via a giant mock-up of a termites nest suggesting such a form of construction is the way out for architecture at a dead end rather like some updated repeat of the mid 1960s Archigram project but this time around replete with an eco veneer and just like aeons ago, helps keeps the idiotic role of architect alive and kicking. Needless to say, we were reminded of the Icteric beetle (see “A Malicious Dunciad in Newcastle” elsewhere on the RAP web) as natural architecture which we unceremoniously threw into the sea at Tynemouth sometime in 1966-7 as already our critique of architecture way back then was becoming more sharpened. No need here to go into psychogeography and all it implied though perhaps it's worth pointing our fulsome praise of the free-for-all relationship between human beings and nature conceived as living space, in a probably ex-colliery allotment in Maltby, South Yorks which we have referred to as the Maltby favela in one of our present films on the demise of the northern Dingy Skipper butterflies to get some idea of a more fruitful way out of the impasse of modern and post modern architecture. More than ever this curious favela – for want of a better description - is a space put together over the years without the aid of the scurrilous profession of architecture!

Yet this art/nature/architecture syndrome pulls all the “the little learning is a dangerous thing” nitwits in everywhere and their numbers are mushrooming and among them sometimes those with the beginning of an idea who could really go somewhere but tend to be derailed by one obfuscation after another. Among these serried ranks can be placed an organisation like “Buglife” which starting out with combative spirit in the road protests of the 1990s directing spot on telling criticisms of English Nature (now Natural England) over the demise of the Desmoulin's whorl snail etc on a Newbury by-pass translocation, (a process whereby threatened species are moved to a new location where they invariably die) relinquished their early promise as more and more they courted official media and were equally more and more patronised by middle-of-the-road eco organisations. The outcome is also today part of the backbone of Pestival. Unable to go down the searching, difficult path of a new total, revolutionary, autonomous critique they have been placated by half measures and “Buglife” is an awe of environmental art!

Alas, we fear something of the same fate, though coming from different angles, may befall “Workers' for Climate Action” who've played such an inspiring part in fomenting the employee occupation of the Vestas wind turbine factory on the Isle of Wight in 2009. We note more and more – like “Buglife” before them – they resort to interesting letter writing to newspapers like the Guardian whom it seems never refuse them. (The Guardian has always refused ours when we've been stupid enough to put pen to paper addressed to that crock of shit!) We note naiveté too though this time through a touching faith in trade union structures as means towards eco/social emancipation without even cautioning about the need for open assemblies outside of any bureaucratic interference. And for sure, their critique of art will probably be non-existent and they could so easily fall for “Pestival” display events. But we shall see....

The occupation of the wind turbine factory on the Isle of Wight laid bare the limitations of the eco movement even in its most progressive aspect, namely the Workers for Climate Action group. An initial enthusiasm was rapidly tempered when it became apparent how much they were still in hock to traditional trade union ideology, the ideology of nationalization and ultimately a workers' state, though this time a 'green' workers' state. However it did mark something of a break and may possibly have occasioned a bit of a rethink in the ranks of the green movement, forcing greens to disinter the real, unofficial, history of the workers' movement that for over a quarter of a century has been declared dead and buried, along with, it is essential to add, the official workers' movement. To say the least there is much catching up to be done and so little time in which to do it. And meanwhile we are still left talking to ourselves and brick walls.

Amid the hubbub caused by the occupation which briefly caught the headlines – Bob Crow the Gen. Sec. of RMT (Rail/Maritime/Transport union) ably summed occupations up as “immediate, focussed and high profile and can force a dispute into the headlines at short notice” – it was soon forgotten that the Vestas plant on the Isle of Wight was a non unionised plant. However this was not true of the Visteon occupation earlier in the year. Visteon was a spin off from Ford and when Ford's decided to close the plant, the staff received just six minutes notice to clear their lockers and get the fuck out. The redundancy terms were far inferior to what they had been promised and after an initial plan to ram the main gates; a back way into the building was found. Local people, some with no connection with the plant, joined in with the struggle and saw it as their own – just as was to happen on the Isle of Wight. A placard appeared “don't need politicians, don't need bosses, workers take control”. A classic statement of its kind and which, if it were to become fact, Leninists, Trotskyites etc would be the first to oppose, workers control of a Ford plant, no matter how radical in terms of rejecting politicians and bosses, simply does not make sense today when it is essential all production is fundamentally altered and redirected according to whether it is sustainable or not. Reimagined is how ecologists like to put it, which gives a hint of the creative flair that is vital to success but not that actual workers need to be mobilised from the ground up in order to carry it out. To save the planet and teach the majority of ecologists a lesson, workers of the world have still to unite.

The slogans that issued from the Vestas occupation, though not as abstractly radical, somehow struck deeper by recognising it was humanity's future that was at stake. The occupying Vestas workers called for the nationalisation of their enterprise unlike the Visteon workers who did not (perhaps realising that this option really was a dead duck), adding, “its about the history of humanity”. However at this point the occupation was open to be taken by the ideology of a “green new deal” which has been much aired since the financial crises hit but not acted upon primarily because it does focus on manufacture and goes against the grain of a country still sold on financial capitalism and the need to protect the hegemony of the City of London whose present sway, as regards these islands, is historically unprecedented. It is an acutely disabling power and the number of people who can no longer open a pot of paint or use a screwdriver is astonishing. It is as if a fatwah has been issued against all practical capacities and the “British genius” for invention put permanently on the dole. To even mention the international division of labour is nigh on forbidden and that the growth in consumption and the spendthrift profligacy that goes with it has been made possible by the off shoring of production and by the willingness of countries, mainly in the east, with a huge trade surplus to fund the deficit. However the demise of the dollar and the decision by China, Russia and France to stop using the US currency for oil trading could mark the end of an Indian summer of a hoped for, and speedy return, to an economy built on financial speculation. Purchasing treasury bonds denominated in a currency likely to go into free fall is not an attractive proposition. Yet again finance capital is as vulnerable as ever to self-slaughter.

Like it or not the greens are very much a part of this disabling tendency and harbour a dislike of blue collar workers. And so it should come as no surprise that come Climate Camp in the late summer of 2009, newspaper coverage had dropped any mention of the Vestas occupation. Given the anti-worker hostility that is endemic in this country, one felt this was not mere oversight but policy and one the greens are more than happy to go along with. On August 31st a letter from Workers for Climate Action appeared in the Guardian claiming that the newspaper’s reports had not mentioned the presence of the Vestas workers who “are still fighting for the nationalisation of the plant” and who are “taking part because they understand that workers organisations and the fight against climate change are inseparable” The letter concludes “trade unionists should join the debate”.
Workers for Climate Action had obviously got wind the turbine factory was due to close long before it was officially announced. Some weeks prior to that they had set up camp outside the main gates and spent long hours talking to the workers who were employed inside. According to the Guardian of July 25th 2009,, "Initially they were met with sceptism but gradually small numbers of workers began to be persuaded that action could make a difference”. The group, to their great credit, obviously played a major part in getting the workers to occupy the plant. The ease with which they were able to talk to the workers must have been greatly facilitated by the fact there were no official trade union representatives present to put them off their stride. Like as not, the latter would have regarded the camp as undermining the negotiations with Vestas management to keep the plant open and would have advised their members to steer clear of the trouble makers, even saboteurs, parked outside. So how come Workers for Climate Action were now directing their appeal at bona fide trade unionists, as if to say people who are not in trade unions can play no part in the struggle? This is a leftist prejudice of the first order and one that throughout history has been disproved time and again initially in some of the writings of Bakunin and William Morris and, a little later, eloquently spelt out by Rosa Luxembourg in her agitational, book length, pamphlet “The Mass Strike” through to the late 1960s and 1970s where this disposition was more prominent than ever e.g. a huge swathe of the May ’68 revolt in France was comprised of the non-unionised etc. Then suddenly a vast dumbing down took place and a direct outcome of the grotesque neoliberal experiment. This theoretical humbug must in part be put down to the catapulting of Workers for Climate Action briefly into the limelight and the fact that Bob Crow of the RMT was prepared to sign a joint letter with them, which the Guardian published without further ado. But even without Crow's imprimatur, letters from the group were published in the newspaper. However if the letters had born witness to the hobbling role of trade unions and political parties in revolutionary moments, and how it will be no different come a genuine green revolution, then, for certain, not one letter would have been published.

So many of these people who make up this half way house critique, though not perhaps Workers' for Climate Action, are precisely the ones who will see in the Guardian's recently created 10:10 campaign (the pledge to cut your personal emissions by 10% within the year) a means of future freedom via fluffy eco get-togethers; the stirring counterpart to the inevitable bureaucratic sclerosis of the Copenhagen climate summit. For isn't the social basis of 10:10 those individuals who've spent their lives climbing somewhat the career ladder oriented around 'concerned' occupations or businesses spewing out high ideological good intent who've flocked to the Guardian's cause? For sure they'll cut somewhat their carbon emissions and tamper with their lifestyles a little but, for certain most will refuse to go down that very difficult, extra mile abandoning their bullshit professions, their buying and selling, or even their augmented purchasing power and/or their love affair with celebrity – minor or major. Like journalist Mad' Bunting they will be adept at a pernickety reeling off of carbon statistics they've improved upon, though essentially they'll never move beyond a holier than thou, deeply hypocritical, essentially moral response to commodified superabundance (for some) making sure their status in this wretched society remains an eternal given.

So it is left to us; those who've been cast aside and thrown away; those without official status either, culturally, politically or scientifically to say the obvious: Down with this huge sideshow – and slideshow – of utter bullshit .There are more of them than us, more, much more. Most of us don't have the means to buy big - or even medium expenditure - carbon polluting items. Most do not own a house, live the suburban existence, or even had/have a car and literally have no empathy with Mad Bunting’s hand wringing over a deluxe, very polluting, Aga cooker. Most too have always travelled by public transport and, as we know, George Monbiot finds buses depressing. So what about us who've never ever found this to be true?

Sadly we also know that most at the real sharp end have little awareness of the impending eco catastrophe and lack any sophistication in reeling off variation upon variation of green thoughts in green shades. However, the constant media bumph spewing out tales of an eco woe not accurately presented means that a minority of sharpenders are beginning to read through the phased alternate lines and are coming to the conclusion, whilst still hanging on somewhat to their fluffy teddy bears, that their carbon front print is very small indeed, so what are they exactly supposed to feel guilty about? It is not a climate change denial alibi neither because it inevitably seems to bring with it heightened, general eco awareness that big storms are on the way headed by an uprising of the dispossessed.

This patchy though growing awareness emanating from the ecos of no property and slight consumer pulling power can only really get somewhere by relying on themselves alone, minus the false friends of eco consumption and the have your cake and eat it alternative. This isn't denial rather its opposite as there is nothing today in dominant society which is creative or worth having. For sure interesting facts, interpretations, tendencies or what have you can for instance be taken from the 'new' nature writing providing all hesitations, half-measures and double dealings of these litterateurs are redefined by a down home energy and a previous wealth of hard, practical experience. It means if necessary we must court arrest through intelligent intervention aimed at getting across – through the publicity of an anti publicity - a sharpened eco awareness as an essential part of renewed, total revolutionary critique. The future points to extreme divergence: The spectacle is marginalising like never before all real thought, contribution and achievement, because in the era of a state supported free market buttressing the rich and super-rich we can only rely on our own genuine internet 2 samizdat, our own blogs, or more permanent ebooks as the facebookers, youtubers, twitterers forever dallying with the society of entertainment are cast aside. As for the rest, a dying, official, all pervasive media wants no truck with us in any case and more importantly, we no longer need to have any truck with them.....

Stuart & David Wise: Autumn 2009

Section 1

(Comments on Woolley Colliery/ Maybey’s “Beechcombing”/ The great storm of 1987 viewed as free form art

Essential childhood differences regarding play and their enduring effects)

Of all the new nature writers Richard Maybey is without a doubt the most art conscious in the “progressive” sense and the one with by far the biggest profile. I intend to confine my comments to his most recent book “Beechcombings” (2007) which came out in 2007, though with luck we intend to finish a short film on the Yorkshire sculpture park shot in 2006 when the park hosted an exhibition of Andy Goldsworthy’s nature nonsense which Maybey praised to the skies. The site could not have been more apt or the contradictions more telling. For just across the MI lay the old pit spoil heap of Woolley colliery now the scene of the utmost destruction upon which a new housing estate, with regal pretensions, was in the process of being constructed. Bearing the portentous title of Woolley Grange, the pit had once employed Arthur Scargill as well as hosted West Yorkshire’s largest Dingy Skipper colony. As far as we know this is the only estate that has actually been constructed on the slopes of the giant spoil heaps that bulk up through West and South Yorkshire, the latter in particular. The others have all been built on the flat surrounding them, so, with a bit of luck, soil creep and inadequate drainage just might result in a well-deserved po-mo Aberfan, the stepped piles of lego-brick, neo-Georgian terraces eventually slithering down the spoil to end up on the muddy flats alongside a pair of rare Little Ringed Plovers. Not only was the estate a triumphalist snub to the former mining community, it was also an act of malevolence against an endangered butterfly whose fate mattered as little to the developers (and ultimately their conservationist legitimators) as did that of the miners.

Above; Woolley Colliery's magnificently disturbed hills just across the M1 from the bland 18th century landscaping of the Yorkshire Sculpture Park at Bretton Hall....

The sub title to “Beechcombings” is “the narratives of trees” implying there are a number from which we can take our pick. It also has post-modernist overtones suggesting each is a fiction in its own way and none really true. And like all post modernist writing it is taboo to ever once mention capitalism, that especially being a fiction we construct - or deconstruct - according to how the mood takes us, any one perspective as valid as that of any other. However the last thing Mabey can be accused of is relativist nihilism - merely that he backs off from ever hitting hard, though the mild mannered, erudite and it has to be said, gentlemanly text is constantly on the edge of tipping into real anger and critique. In the unlikely event of Mabey exploding with fury, he would unfortunately find that he would lose all of his false friends, partner and publishers overnight and that they would not be replaced by a better class of person, which by rights is what ought to happen. Such is the subtlety and brutishness of today’s blanket totalitarianism he would find himself marginalized to a degree he would not have thought possible, disrespected and denigrated at every turn. On the upside he would, at long last, find out who his real friends were.

Yet throughout the book Mabey’s real sympathies obviously lies with the commoners, as if they alone came closest to understanding and appreciating the essence of trees and the variable essence of woodland renewal and regeneration. Though hardly a let be approach, their “narrative” comes closest to that of the trees themselves had they been gifted with the capacity to speak. These and artists belonging to the 19th century Barbizon school and -----would you adam 'n' eve it ----- today's installation artists! Though he does not specifically mention Andy Goldsworthy in his book, Mabey does reproduce his nature sculpture “Beech Leaves at Scaur water” dated 1992 and his “Continuous Grass Stalks - Climbing a Tree Pinned with Thorns” dated 1983 from the Yorkshire Sculpture Park and “Wall Sheaves” from 1993, a beech sculpture by David Nash, in fact mere planks of wood, which, though beautiful in themselves, are made ugly by being claimed as art by some tit of an artist. When compared to a fabulous photo of pollarded beech trees taken in1962, the former artworks pale into nothingness beside this twisting, crippled, arthritic flare-up of a tree. Away from the stink of art, this unpretentious photo lets nature speak for herself.

Mabey does however quote Antony “Gormless” Gormley approvingly whose studio was wrecked by the Great Storm of 1987 and whom he claims was one of the few with the discernment to enter into the storm’s critical spirit. He told a Times journalist “I regard the whole thing being in a sense nature pruning the works of man. There are times when I feel it was strangely appropriate…. One whole aspect of my work has been to reposition man within a kind of elemental context”. Banking context more like, for all installation art is a for-runner and celebration of gentrification, of money destroying what’s left of the exceptional and hope for a better future. Imposing the most dreadful conformity to commodification there has ever been, it is the death knell of let be, revolt and spontaneity whether in nature or man.

Two days after the Great Storm, Mabey toured the Kent /Sussex border to inspect the damage. Two days after the storm we were laying floors for a solicitor who had made something of a reputation defending the Angry Brigade. His pretend radicalism had long gone and amassing money had become the sole purpose of his wretched existence. Not content with the fees he was earning defending rich villains, he too treated the storm as an opportunity – an opportunity to make money by hiring lorries to pick up the felled trees he then intended to mill and sell. Unable to conceal our disgust, a day later we were laid off for taking the piss. Mabey says of the storms aftermath “the elegant landscape parks of the Garden of England were comprehensively rearranged”. We were delighted that Seven Oaks had lost all but one of its oaks and that especially the Royal Parks were a scene of utter devastation. Try as he might, Mabey couldn’t quite stifle his enthusiasm either, describing the Petworth estate in Sussex as “turned into a free form jungle” and that “he saw children having the time of their lives crawling about these vast natural climbing frames”.

Uprooted trees in Kensington Park, London following the great storm of October, 1997. One of the great storms of history, its real threat was not to trees - most elderly trees withstood the hurricane force winds - but to public order, dramatically changing this most royal - and boring - park for the good. But, of course, the trees were not allowed to thrive horizontally, and even in less doctored environments, it is rare to find a flourishing tree just as it fell in this most salutary of storms. Left unmolested in Kensington Park, and just two years on from the defeat of the British miners' strike, these levelling trees could easily have been read as foretelling the fall of the Windsors. Dendrologists learnt much from the roof plates of the blown-over trees and it became apparent that the trees most affected were young trees that had reached full size but had not the girth or developed root system to resist the gale. But, as always. real conservation had to be sacrificed to the ruling ideology of conservation, the clean-up and indiscriminate replanting inflicting at least as much ecological damage as the storm itself. The colossal sums of money spent on "restoring the nation's ravaged woods and parks" would only be exceeded (in fact greatly exceeded) by the amount lavished on spoil heap makeovers come the turn of the millenia. However, the latter was a vengeful act taking every conservationist body with it, whereas it is becoming increasingly respectable to condemn the wholesale rush to hew and sell-off the stricken trees following the hurricane of 1997.

The two contrasting perspectives are the measure of the differences separating us from Mabey. As a young lad growing up in the Chilterns he had given names to old (beech) trees, all of which are still standing. We did the same, except the location could not be more different. The landscapes of our childhood in the Co Durham and West Yorkshire have been all but obliterated for they were semi industrial though nature rich. Though not the only ones, railway stations, goods yards, sidings were our playgrounds of choice now all gone excepting the ‘heritage line’ that runs from Darlington to Bishop Auckland. Today a shadow of its former self, the line once continued on to Tow law and Wearhead right into the heart of the England largest expanse of common land totalling over 90,000 acres! Some years ago fondly looking at a photo of a field outside of a mean row of five station houses at Heighington in Co Durham where once we were privileged to live, it suddenly came to me the now grassed over, undulating strips were the remains of common land tillage. But the other lines that once were our familiars, like the one that ran from Wakefield to Bradford, are now nearly untraceable beneath unforgiving, ‘executive’ housing estates and roads including the MI which cuts right through it. I can never cross the refurbished railway bridge, the olive green wrought iron panels now replaced with breeze block, on Station Road in Ossett without recalling with a pang what once lay beneath it as recently as 1970. A magnificent railway station built on a curve, for example, the formally innovative utilitarianism – coach houses were traditional in comparison – involuntarily, and only briefly, redolent of a new way of living, malling having now totally destroyed the promise that once existed in railway stations.

The above photos are of a Heighington station, Co Durham and its environs that no longer exists marking the exact place where George Stevenson's Locomotion No 1 was first placed on the railway in 1825. The bottom right photo is of nearby Codlings Bridge where corncrakes could regularly be heard and where the dark green fritillary and var hospita albino form of the wood tiger moth were relatively abundant. Indeed in one of the trees near the bridge we once espied a large tortoiseshell butterfly....

Dead moths in their hundreds would accumulate at the bottom of the glass bowls protecting the gas mantles and if we were there when the mantles were replaced on Ossett station we would take the moths away with us. An entry in a joint nature diary from August 13th 1954 records how we witnessed a swallow chase a moth and "eat it up" that had been disturbed by a railway worker passing under the eves of a shed in the goods yard. Another entry records how on May 10th in the same year and in the same yard "a short tailed field vole" measuring "about 2 inches" and that “I nearly went over it one (sic) my bike”. These once fairly commonplace occurrences now truly are a thing of the past.

Above photos taken in the mid 20th century of the beautiful structure that was once Ossett station and its surrounds in West Yorkshire. it was an environment where industry and wild-ish nature happily intermingled though on the cusp of the devastating invasion of an increasingly highly capitalised horticulture. In this peripheral wilderness of weeds, large elephant hawk, poplar hawk and peppered moth caterpillars - the latter mainly of the industrial melanic form - thrived in late summer/early autumn The bottom left photo shows the remnants of a burnt out signal cabin which simply exploded one night at the bottom of our garden....

The young Mabey would take adults on a tour around his called-into-being trees in the Chilterns. We gave names to the local topography of dereliction, particularly the long barrow like mounds that had been pushed up overnight during the Second World War to disguise the nearby armaments factory. “Indian Hill” was our favourite and it may well have concealed a number of natural hills for on its summits there were the splintered, hollow carcasses of what, thinking back, may well have once been elm trees. The entire man-made creation was covered in gorse that attracted flocks of Goldfinch and, to our delight, the occasional Waxwing in autumn. To facilitate access we thought nothing of cutting a maze of ‘secret’ passages through the gorse and such was the absence of constraint on this industrial common that we went about it entirely unmolested, except for once being stopped by the police who wanted to know what we doing carrying makeshift bowie knives.

Above: Random pages from a childhood Nature Diary. (See longer discussion on "Fuck the New Nature Writing"

Maybey’s relationship to the landscapes of his youth was passive in comparison to ours and hedged with restrictions, this common metaphor a graphic illustration of how hostility to enclosure has entered the unconscious of the English language. Other than in farmers’ fields, we knew no hedges and we made free play with the industrial detritus left lying about. And so decades later when we ventured once more on to industrial wastes in search of butterflies, the unreflected anarchism of our childhood and early youth surged within us once more as ours by right and we exploded with incomprehension whenever we were stopped by authority, for right of access was in our blood much as the right to pasture animals once was for commoners. And so we collided head on with conservation bodies whose first priority, we mused bitterly, was to give butterflies lessons in Lockeian civics which would teach them not to trespass and to respect other people’s property.

Mabey grew up at a time when the countryman and woman and traditional country crafts were rapidly disappearing from the rural scene to be replaced by the ignorant, vulgar, experiment phobic, 4 wheel drive, home owning circus of nothingness we are all so heartily fed up with. Peopled with slaves to the market in consumer goods, the countryside becomes a mere image on a postcard and the last refuge of the petrol head, nature a selling point in the estate agents description. Between the latter and the industrial agronomists there is a growing army of professional ecologists whom are not exactly buzzing with life, that don’t swear, get drunk and beside themselves with rage and who never savagely kick back. In the last analysis, Mabey is very much part of this refined coterie of buttoned-up professionals, far more likely to move on and become therapists than ever frankly admit the only solution is revolution.

And Mabey does mention in passing just such a case - and that of Arthur Tansley the renowned botanist who, for a short while, gave up botany to study with Freud. Quitting his post in Cambridge in 1923, Tansley returned to academia in 1927 when he was appointed Sheridan Professor of Botany at Oxford, before stooping lower still to become a knight. However Tansley’s abrupt move sideways is not to be dismissed so easily because it is a cotyledon of something that threatens to grow like Jack’s beanstalk, combining childhood, nature, the psyche and revolt. Though it has never found its proper voice, throughout the country’s history of the last eight centuries we continue to hear the strongest of echoes – like when Wordsworth wrote “the child is father of the man”.

Researching the history of industrial activity, particularly mining and quarrying, on the common lands of the South Pennies and whose residue of earth works and shales have greatly aided the recent, astonishing spread of the Green Hairstreak butterfly, I became aware of how these upland rural areas once teemed with characters whose lives at some point must have touched on the insurrection taking place in the rapidly industrialising valleys below. Take ‘Old Three Laps’, for example, who appeared to have modelled himself on Heathcliff: indulging his unrequited love, he took to his bed for forty years. (Well, it beats working, the late Victorian writer reprimanding him for his indigence whilst having to admit ‘Old Three Laps’ certainly added variety to the upland scene!) Except for the odd rambler, today, the countryside is an impoverished wasteland of dull conformity where nature fascinates more than people, when, particularly in the days of Defoe and John Ray, a happier equilibrium once existed.

Returning to my childhood I recall how we would go ratting with Mr Goldsborough, a railway worker who also owned the field on which the marks of communal strip cultivation were still visible. Close to a brick tunnel through which ran Demon’s Beck and over which ran the legendary Stockton and Darlington railway, there was an old oak tree, the “old oak tree” as we called it. Over the years it had become top heavy, its root system dangerously exposed by the scouring action of the beck. It needed pruning and so a terrific guy of ‘a retard’ employed by the railway was given the task of sawing off some of the trees biggest limbs. We children were the only ones present and watched him climb the mighty oak, ease himself along a branch and begin to saw, with him seated on the outer reach of the branch. Sure enough, when it did crash to the ground he was on it. “Lighting Dennis” was another shining ‘retard’, remembered and respected for backing almost an entire goods train into the waters of Whitby’s inner harbour, right opposite the still working boatyard where Captain Cooke’s “Endeavour” was built, where this singular wreck of a goods train could have made the most memorable ever artificial reef. And then there were the railway men who, from the safety of the goods yard running alongside the mouth of the river Esk, would stretch night lines across the harbour with little fear of the water bailiffs ever catching them.

The railway sidings at Whitby in the early 1860s set alongside the river Esk right next to the tidal mud flats where the golden plover regularly nested. A later typical development of the inner harbour for liesure time yaghting meant the bird was exterminated. The photo left is of the railway line along Upgang to Sandsend and the coastal route to Middlesborough and though closed well before the Beeching cuts of the early 1960s, it signified the triumph - and ultimately eco disaster - of car transport....

I mention these incidents since Mabey is unable to reminisce like this. What has this to do with the battle for nature? Well in truth as little and as much as Thomas Bewick’s many vignettes depicting the human–all-too-human foibles of Northumberland’s rural poor and who had just as much right to be there as did a Woodcock and Mistle Thrush. For people and nature formed more of a continuum then and which must be recovered in ways we can scarcely, as yet, guess at. Looking back I have a fund of very precious memories which directly challenge the insidious stereotyping of the industrial working class as straight laced, uniformly dull, nature comatose men and women lacking in imagination and a desire to change life. And when the “revolution of everyday life” finally did hit this country in the late 1960s, it not only instantly tied so many separate strands together but caused me to reconnect with my teen and preteen years. The many incidents I had witnessed came to be imbued with a radical hue through which a new life was visibly searching to be born. Continuing to worry out yet more memories, my opinion has not changed in over forty years.

Take my grandfather’s signal box situated on Battersby Junction station midway between Middlesboro and Whitby. This signal cabin looked on to the North York Moors and there is a photograph of my grandfather in it. Someone with half an eye must have come across the photograph because a few years ago it was on sale in Whitby, alongside Sutcliffe’s pioneering photos of the harbour taken in the closing years of the 19th century. In this photograph my grandfather, contentedly puffing his pipe, is sitting in an easy chair. It was an obligatory fixture in all signal cabins, the turned wooden legs invariably charred by the burning cinders which fell out of the coal fires that superheated these unlike greenhouses mounted on preposterously exaggerated brick foundations, and that made signal cabins such welcoming places in winter. A canopy of plants obscures the ceiling, some of whose tendrils appear to be entwined around the less frequently used signal levers (and which were always that bit harder to pull). He has made the place his own. To describe it as home from home is to misinterpret what the cabin signified to my grandfather. It was an escape from home - and my grandmother would have to send her children down to the station to implore him to come home, otherwise, once his shift was over, he could have well stayed in his cabin all night long. The communal nature of allotments has habitually functioned as a safety valve, venting pressures building up within the nuclear family. At their best they prefigure a new world and, it has to be said, miners’ allotments excelled in this respect. These allotment were never just about saving on household bills: they were also a declaration of intent, a right to build as one thought fit – free -form extemporisation as opposed to the dragging tidiness of home life, four walls and the linear terrace, scrounged material as opposed to the shop bought commodity. However, in my grandfather’s case it was a very controlled environment - and had to be given it was a functioning signal box. Though at the bottom of the cabin steps there was a poke that housed a pig, a chicken run and several beehives (he swore he could tell which were his honey bees whenever he went on the moors), within the limits of the permissible, my grandfather had conjured a spell binding palace of glass, leaves, electromagnetism, pulleys, levers, gear wheels and flowers out of a no frills, industrial man-coop.

Grandah Wise in his signal box surrounded by a jungle of hanging potted plants. Above right, a present day Battersby Junction station now overgrown with a delightful display of weeds....

Back at the family home, one of about thirty houses divided into two red brick terraces more typical of a Lancashire mill town than the farms and villages built of stone that dot the sylvan foothills of the North Yorks Moors, the one and only picture that hung on the wall was of a local farm set in a fold on a moor land hillside. It was simply called “Midnight Farm” because the sun never shone on it. I always wanted to be taken to this anti farm, this negation of sunshine, chlorophyll and everything that a farm stood for, its mysterious allure obviously capturing the imagination of our grandparents as well as my brother and I. What did this dark, forbidding place, this Wuthering Heights of non-conforming agriculture, really say about my grandparents? Why did they prefer it to a far happier reproduction of, say, the “Hay Wain”, or a Gainsborough or Hobbema? They must have felt a seed’s kinship with this darkness. Was it, perhaps, calling time on a sunny tradition of landscape painting, as if only out of a midnight nursery like this could a new world come?

At the local village school in Ingelby, the children of railway workers repeatedly outshone children from agricultural backgrounds, including farmers’ children. When I pause to reflect what this humble signalman, with virtually no schooling, had picked up in terms of rearing animals, keeping bees, growing vegetables in addition to mastering morse, basic mechanics and developing an interest in mathematics for its own sake, I am led, at the very least, to conclude here were the rudiments of a more developed totality. Given habitual experiences like this, is it to be wondered that from our earliest years we never found nature and industry to be that antithetical.

Section 2

(Ecology and corporatism/the industrial commons and freedom /Shelley & industry/Children’s nature book especially Kenneth Grahame/On dens & anti architecture)

Ecologists, particularly in this country, tend to spontaneously bundle workers and management together in the same, detestable, corporatist package. No matter how the pack is shuffled, they are inclined to find this combination of nature and industry, rather than nature v industry, an abhorrent one and are wilfully deaf to its historical resonance in this country. It would be surprising if, parallel with demands for greater job security and an end to wage cutting subcontracting, wildcatting, engineering construction workers in the energy sector were not beginning to openly argue the case for a green energy plan. (The inspirational occupation of the Vestas plant on the Isle of Wight points to this) In terms of an equitable exchange between nature and industry, it is now or never. And the energy sector is at the heart of this exchange. However there is not a chance it can be accomplished within a capitalist framework. The question therefore can never, never, never be solely a technical one and though technical innovations, like carbon capture and sequestration can buy much needed time, mankind will not be free so long as ecological technocrats, bureaucrats, politicians and capitalists are free to roam the earth.

Growing up in the years following the Second World War, I have, on reflection, become aware of other formative aspects. In a curious way the ancient liberties of the commons merged with the ideology of nationalisation, the coal and steel industry but particularly the railways, forming an ever present background to our play and fledgling interest in nature. Ideologies are never empty chimeras and the ideology of public ownership positively contributed to the surprising absence of restrictions we experienced as mere striplings. In comparison with today’s youth, it was a “self-determined” childhood. The comparative freedom from constraint afforded by this unique, greened over industrial playground moreover bred in us a psychological expansiveness, the absence of hedges a preparation for the tearing down of barriers of a different order that would later arise. And so when we did eventually come to read the romantics, the ready acceptance of horizonless disparities on a collision course – adventure - immersion in dreams, landscape, engine sheds, chimneys, industrial cowls - love of butterflies and moths - biology- depth psychology – love - popular struggle came about because it was the fruit of an experience that, in considerable part, went back to the unfettered play we enjoyed on these “unbounded” industrial commons.

Though not an entirely apt one, a line from Shelley springs to mind: “I love all waste and solitary places where we taste the pleasure of believing what we see is boundless, as we wish our souls to be.” Writing when he did, his love of Waste is insufficiently nuanced, Shelley’s conception of industry then the opposite of a Waste. In his early 20s, and though impoverished, he had enthusiastically raised money for a reclamation scheme in Cardigan Bay which involved the building of a giant embankment, or Cobb, across the mouth of Traeth Mawr. The expansion of the port of Holyhead in North Wales sealed the fate of the projected port at Porthdinallen in Cardigan Bay, though the Cobb, somewhat ironically, now carries that talisman of functioning industrial antiquarianism, the Ffestiniog Railway. Knowledge of Shelley the friend of industry has been buried beneath that of the nature poet, and we need to be reminded of the fact. That said, the straitjacketed categorisation of the latter won’t do either. Evident in practically everything that Shelley wrote is the search for art’s transcendence in unrestrained nature. The Skylark’s song is perfect fulfilment and cannot be surpassed whilst art remains “a thing wherein we feel some hidden want”.

Actually the Cobb, and the related reclamation scheme upon which the new town of Tremadoc was built, required an act of Parliament, presumably because it was Common Land. Surprisingly, census figures from 1956 show that the area of common land in Cardigan had expanded slightly since the last census in 1873, doubtless due to a post war increase in the number of nature reserves and SSS1s. In industrial Glamorgan there had only been a marginal decrease. Again this is surprising, given that during the interval there had been a massive increase in the number of pits sunk in the steep sided Glamorgan valleys. The Commission on Common Land held during the mid 1950s were forced to conclude “if the land is common land, it would seem that many of the mining operations – construction of railway sidings, works, site of dumps etc – by the National Coal Board is ultra vires. Furthermore, much of the land concerned is eminently suitable for afforestation, but who has the right to plant?” This absence of an unambiguous legal framework meant that even prior to nationalisation, much industrial infrastructure was treated by workers – and not just workers – with an impatient, expropriating disregard because ,come the crunch, trespass laws were fundamentally unenforceable. Closer to the present day, Thorne Waste, a raised peat land of great age and scarcity, was saved from almost certain destruction by a gang of cutlass brandishing, dynamite hurling desperados that went by the name of “Bunting’s Beavers”. Composed of miners from Thorne Colliery, engineers, (and anyone else who cared to join in and could keep schtumm) they would leave calling cards that read “sue us you buggers if you dare”, their exhaustive knowledge of common law rendering them virtually untouchable, though some spent time in jail. (We hope to put together the story of the Beavers from a former member we met on Thorne Wastes who like the Ancient Mariner had us spellbound, unable to move off the largest raised wetlands in Western Europe even though night was falling).

Above left: Large Heath butterfly on Thorne Wastes on the day we met Bunting's Beavers on July 17th 1997. The opposite photograph is of the general terrain but with the extremely tall winding gear of Thorne pit in the background. The pit was mothballed during the 1993 pit closure programme but has since been pulled down....

A long held, very fierce grudge against the privatisation of common land morphed to include the private industry erected on it, the abolition of private property signifying to many an industrial worker (and from our experience, usually the most experimental and alive to new ideas) a retracing of lost steps to a scrap heap reinvention of life in the wild. Was it just our identification with Native Americans that caused us to name the long barrow of an artificial hill we haunted “Indian Hill” and along whose side there ran “Street One”, a concrete road as unforgiving and Euclidean as only industrial roads can be. Or were more local ancient spirits already speaking the language of subversion to us? Sometimes we carried staves and one railway worker in particular would always ask us if we were going “lancing”, an expression which even then struck me as unusual and could not possibly mean joisting. Perhaps it harked back to the black acts or even earlier and referred to the illegal spearing of wild animals on enclosed manorial estates. The word den grew its meaning on common land for Denns in the 8th century were originally outlying, felled woodland pastures. The overtone of remoteness, of a secret place safe from prying eyes and adulthood was taken up by children, we in particular becoming the ingénue architects of a hundred dens, some of the most imaginative the least noticeable and as cryptic as a barely detectable Buff Tip moth at rest on a budding twig . There but at the same time not there, they were the ones we would most dream about when tucked up in bed at night. Almost invisible to the naked eye they were, for that reason, as indestructible as childhood itself, and I don’t doubt that the ideas we were to develop much later on of a pushed- to- the -wall, negation of building, have their origins here. Though once thought sheer lunacy not that long ago, a growth architecture that postures as not-architecture is rapidly becoming part of the mainstream. However, what really counts here is the media bio feed nurturing architects’ reputation. We on the contrary sought nothing less than imaginative self build on a global scale, a vision that automatically lead to the destruction of the role of architect on a global scale.

A den was also home to a fox – at least in Co Durham and North Yorks though elsewhere lair may have been the more common term. A badger had its sett, the rabbit its burrow and warren, the squirrel its drey but the wily fox had its den. Once in a hen run, the fox was merciless, yet our hearts went out to it. There was something about its fugitive, hunted existence that appealed to the railway workers I knew as a child. I recall how my mother once opened the back door to a fox that had been pursued across the railway lines by the Quorn hunt, then rushing quickly to open the front door so the fox could escape the hounds. More than a wish to protect the fox that had recently slain all our hens, this was a protest against the two Co Durham’s, that of its aristocratic landowners in West Durham and that of its spat-upon industrial workers, particularly miners, in East Durham, my mother having come from a mining background. High upon the list of my grandfather’s (the signalman mentioned previously) favourite books was “Reynard the Fox”, a book that also delighted us as children. He too must have felt a strong identification with foxes, despite their periodic raids on his hens. The saying “as sly as a fox” may have been construed by him as an ability to remain poker faced when confronted with authority – in my grandfather’s case the hated railway bosses, for this was the era prior to rail nationalisation. Though it is easy to dismiss the humanization of animals as mere folk psychology and more typical of pre-industrial eras, here are instances of it informing industrial struggle. In America’s Deep South the boll weevil, which destroyed cotton crops and therefore the livelihood of slave owners, became another symbol of resistance.

Another favourite country writer of both my grandfathers (one a signalman, the other a miner) was G Branwell Evans, the Methodist minister turned poseur gipsy and going by the name of “Romany”. Though Evans gave repertory names to the birds and mammals he observed in company with Tim, a farmer’s son, his chapters on “Droll and Darkie the Rooks”, “Brock the Badger” etc were full of naturalistic observation. And though the ‘stories’ would unfold over several seasons, they were not anthropoid narratives in the manner of Kenneth Grahame, author of “Wind in the Willows”, or Beatrix Potter and would never make it onto the West End Stage. In fact they were more akin to Favre’s beguiling, and much superior, narratives of insect life from which the human persona is even more absent. Mulling over these facts and a few phone calls later it occurred to me I knew next to nothing about Wind in the Willows, Winnie the Pooh, Flopsy, Mopsy and Cotton tail, Swallows and Amazons Puck of Pooks Hill, Peter Pan and the entire arcania of children's stories written in the closing years of the 19th century and the first decade of the 20th century. Would I have done so if they had been on my parents and grandparents bookshelves? And why weren’t they there? Did they perhaps find something repellent in them as I did - and still do? However “Sajo and her Beaver People” and the characterines of “Big Small” and “Little Small“, the two beavers, were a different matter, the antipodal naming delighting me as much as the fact that waterproof canoes could be made from birch bark, no other tree thereafter having quite the same appeal to me as the birch. A portent of spring, the birch became a symbol of rebirth in more ways than one, for it was the first tree to appear on industrial spoil and in railway sidings. Today I see it as a harbinger of a nature sensitive, industrial renewal, a liberatory tree for a liberatory technology, just as the beavers’ names suggested the possibility of a countermanding renewal of language.

But as for “Wind in the Willows”, I do recall doing a jigsaw puzzle at the age of six or seven of Toad of Toad Hall pursued by a gang of wildcatting weasels in a train. Our sympathies even then were with the weasels, not least because they were actually leaning out of a steam engine with a perspiring Squire Toad fleeing before them, in fear for his life. Now Co Durham, where we were then living, was the birthplace of the railways, and odd though this sounds, it was popularly perceived as a “proletarian” achievement, an idea, though it had reactionary implications (the apostle of self help Samuel Smiles wrote a book entitled “The Great Engineers”) not as daft as it might first appear. Many of the great early railway engineers received little schooling: not only was the great George Stephenson, the inventor of the “Rocket” (the first antigravity machine, steam pressure replacing gravitational pull), actually illiterate but he liked nothing better than to challenge someone to a bout of bare knuckle boxing to relieve the tedium of a “board meeting”. Real kids stuff and we loved nothing better than as children to be taken on a Saturday morning by our uncle to a small industrial workshop in Shildon where engineers would casually gather to shoot the breeze but also discuss technical stuff. The workshop was situated on the road to Brusselton, the great incline having featured in a panoramic illustration from the 1820s that not only depicted the stationary engines and cables that hauled coal trucks up the incline, but also, on the level ground, Stephenson’s locomotives that were as “busy as ants”.

Shildon, Co Durham many moons ago. The photo left is of the oldest engine shed in the world in a state of derilection. Thirty years later and the shed became a museum.Standing opposite (photo left) was the home of Timothy Hackworth, the railway engineer who invented the spoke wheel. Like everyone else we called the place "tintacs". A similiar fate was to befall that dwelling too and you wonder which is worse: a gutted landscape or gentrification?

The metaphor whispers in another way for my uncle was both a skilled carpenter and foreman at a small wagon works owned by British Rail. Much of the timber that came into the yards for the repair of damaged rolling stock came from abroad and he would feed our imaginations - and his - with real tales of wood boring larvae, some so fearsome they could slice through a carpenter’s pencil with the ease of an executioner’s axe. A likely story, but the truth of falsehood with a good conscience turned trumps and we became fascinated with native wood boring moths like the evil smelling Goat Moth, the beauteous Leopard Moth and the many different, harmless, Clearwing moths that mimicked stinging wasps such as the Hornet Clearwing, the latter the only Clearwing we have so far seen. We, in turn, wove our own slightly less exaggerated history around them, others also, including adults, becoming fascinated by them. To be sure, we did embroider nature but I can’t say our expectations were dashed and we became progressively disenchanted as we learnt more about these extraordinary insects. It was easily more nature friendly any day than, after reading “Wind in the Willows”, fancifully expecting to see frock coated animals buttoned up against the cold amongst knotted tree roots. From an early age the bleached carcases of tree stumps became a source of inspiration to us, their form and content of great appeal to us. Lying on their sides like a tipped over L, the shattered trunk and branches became a skeletal torso of arms, elbows, hands and preternatural head that crumbled into rotting chips revealing beetles and hopefully the moth larvae we were intent on finding. We had no need of further animation because these ghost trees were already alive. Today, “Buglife” rightly argues for the retention of fallen trees but many years earlier we and others had intuitively arrived at the same conclusion, though not necessarily by the same route. A tree left where it fell indicated a relaxing of property rights and, like a disused factory or siding, that monster field was now safe to enter. When visiting the Yorkshire Sculpture Park in 2006 to jeer at everything we saw but especially Andy Goldsworthy the only escape we found from artistic oppression was in the sheep droppings and the occasional dead tree, but even these lost their allure latter took on some of the characteristics of it surroundings and became art losing its dead treeness.

None of the books I mentioned above we ever read in the sink schools we attended as children and teenagers. This must say something fundamental about them. Added almost en passant as if he does not wish to draw too much attention to it Mabey does admit that in “Wind in the Willows” class war was waged against the weasels. He also acknowledges the tamed suburban nature grown up on the ruins of a buried city which badger, ratty and mole inhabit is not that of the wildwood but through a persistent misreading has become so. In a characteristic inverting of the truth, it is the denizens of the wildwood that are stand offish, peculiar and “not like us”, the animals grouped around badger never anything other than affable and approachable in an offbeat kind of way. Inevitably it is the suspicious, easily offended, unpredictable lumpen weasels that start the trouble, with badger and the other animals, like true, decent Brits, forced into retaliation, secure in the knowledge they did not cast the first stone. Like most of the other seminal children’s stories previously cited, “Wind in the Willows” was written against a background of growing social unrest and though it pleads for a return to nature, it is, above all, a moderate, reformist plea for a bourgeoisified nature. In Grahame’s eyes, the unyielding, machined austerities of Victorianism and equally motorized morality had finally let loose the primeval beast of “the great unrest” that formerly had rampaged on the great “wastes” safely beyond the ken of civilisation.

Though no one at the time was able to make the connection, the old mole of revolution had grubbed away in a double sense. To Kenneth Grahame, Secretary to the Bank of England, the real wildwood and unbidden, more than consciously autonomous, industrial action had come to mean much the same thing It is not just the fact these children’s books were an exact hominid ledger of class society that made them somewhat mystifyingly distasteful to us. This got-up fantasy of middle English speaking animals also amounted to a kind of betrayal, even to our child minds, of the imagination, natures inherent riches not needing to be dressed up in nursery costumes. Free to roam from a very early age, our childhood was lived outside the “nursery”- whatever that was. We befriended animals; we even had an animal graveyard for out pets, every so often digging up the tortoise to see “how it was getting on”. Our eyes transfixed on an infinitely varied surface, we did not need to metamorphose them into something they were not. In the school playground a ditty made its round: “There are fairies in the bottom of my garden/ There are fairies in the bottom of my well/Are there fairies in the bottom of your garden? –Are there hell!” Yet this down to earth, crushing realism was far from lacking in vision. Its anti mythological concreteness and practical engagement with the world was, I sincerely believe, more an anticipation of classless society and the polar opposite of Graham’s ethological anthropomorphism and deification of suburbia.

One wonders what Mervyn King, the present Governor of the Bank of England, might now come up with were he to open his laptop after first getting ripped on smoke. A guileless, free-market “Animal Farm” or “Animal Pharma” would be too obviously political and seen as satirical in intent, thus defeating its purpose. The watchword has to be obedience to the laughing hyenas of the banking fraternity who want us scurrying about like scared rabbits rather than behaving like rats in a trap, or worse, massing like locusts on the Thames embankment prior to descending on the City of London .

Manipulative children’s fantasies cast their most binding spell when they appear not to have a political axe to grind. Moreover dead tree format has had its day, so a more interactive format would need to be found, a Wii game, perhaps, in which the bot flies of the of the Financial Services Authority take on us plodding shire horses stabled on dealing floors? However, in order that the FSA or dealing floors remain an immovable fixture in our lives, it is absolutely essential they first be interred deep underground and their controlling presence made to appear a nigh on absent one, just like the urban foundations of Graham’s pseudo wildwood. How very, very English!

Above is a photo of a dead oak tree on Ashstead Common, Surrey, together with a photo of a Purple purple emperor on a youngish oak sapling in July 1997. Many of the often 500 years old oaks around Ashstead are now virtually dead specimens ending their days as gnarled oddities easily giving off the appearance of goulish witch-like monsters that take up their roots and walk when darknessfalls. No wonder they were the inspiration for all those Arthur Rackham's illustrations that scared many a child witless....

Section 3

(The conceit ridden character of English/Milton & Keats/Mabey’s beeches and Marx’s commodity fetishism/the commons as realisation of the critiques of rights/Mabey’s dislike of social and ecological revolution/ The near uselessness of conservation bodies)

No other language is more conceit ridden than English and to probe the reasons why is a major investigative task in itself. The cataclysmic events that rocked Britain, though in particular England, from the peasants revolt onwards resulted in a layering of the language that was so dense as to almost obscure the actual revolutionary convulsions that lay beneath it, language through its own autonomous development appearing to become convulsed instead. The siren voices of revolution are everywhere in Shakespeare, though probably despite himself. Then comes Milton and “Paradise Lost”, this epic poem the end of the line for all epic poetry and also rooted in a civil war in which the spectre of communism is more than just an apparition and so altogether different from the Peloponnesian Wars of the Iliad or that of Rome v Carthage in Virgil’s Aeneid. Try going back and all you will get instead are the bore wars of Middle Earth and digitised sublimity for the kiddies. Then compare Miltonic literalness with the “dromedary camel” of the metaphysical poets, the beginnings of modern industry and communal seekings, part of the “new philosophy that puts all in doubt” in which “meanings press and screw”. Then finally there are the Romantics after which the English language very abruptly – at least in England - settles into a suspicious, insular slumber from which it cannot be awakened, its once inexhaustible formal inventiveness traduced into the idiom of industry, of iron, steel, steam, pipes, girders, batteries, cylinders, pumps----------- requiring a revolutionary proletariat for their proper articulation, without which this industrial disequilibria will remain mere doggerel. “Too vast a matter for so weak a rhyme” proclaims Shelley in his remarkable “Letter to Maria Gisborne”. But otherwise this historical shift went unnoticed. As for the English language------well that becomes French, literary symbolism demonstrating once and for all that once society becomes indecipherable then the poetry must follow suit, until finally the only way out is to permanently swap the pen for the hammer.

Meanwhile in science Cartesianism is the name of the game throughout, matter existing independently of mind, each of which can be studied without reference to the other. Mabey is right to want to unambiguously put the ghost back into the machine in a “literary”, if not a metaphysical sense, because a non-metaphorical beech tree is a dead one, dead to history, dead to us, and above all dead to itself, the scientific realization of “literature” enabling the tree to live for the first time in natural history and social history, it too acquiring an omega all of its own at the “end of pre history”. And Mabey does put it most eloquently “Beech trees are persistently cast as victims, they’re repeatedly looted, excoriated as bad influences and wastes of land, granted reprieves, turned into scapegoats and hostages – this is the story of the beeches with an eye for the trees experience of what happened”. But let us at least grant that in large part these metaphors are rooted in social relationships, more specifically in a class divided society and that they also are the real expressions of a class divided society and not mere artifice. These metaphors reflect the social character of trees not just as a raw material but also as political facts and a source of enjoyment (or otherwise) itself mediated by changing tastes driven in the last analysis by changes in the modes of production. Like the commodity they become a personification of social relationships but whereas the universal medium of exchange, money, - its genus if you like –, takes on many different popular names (chicken feed, rhino, dosh, readies, bread, loot, smackers, spondulies etc) the genus tree never undergoes a comparable name changing. Only in the genera’s individual ramification as separate species does it do so and then only at the moment of gravest crises for Keats’s “the grand democracy of forest trees”. Coming very late in the day, this is, at best, only a halfhearted admission that natural facts are also social facts and that natural history is also a people’s history, dinosaurs included, which is not the same thing as saying we walked alongside them.

Mark Cocker in his recent book “Crow Country” reckoned he had just about read everything there was to read in English on crows. One cannot help wondering did Mabey sit himself down to read every item that came up when he googled “beech” on his computer? There is something too literary about his beech conceits that overwhelm the subject and that tend to turn the beech into a work of art and nature into a gallery. However Mabey as a proto gallerista of the wild, a trend that is becoming ever more important, spurred on by the reaction to the financial crises has to be left for another web that specifically deals with this issue. Yet this whole drift into fantasy projections, at the same time both imaginary and real, caused neurons to fire in my brain and I was drawn once more to open Marx’s “Capital” and read Chapter 4, “The Fetishism of the Commodity and its Secret”. And what material does Marx select to demonstrate how a raw material becomes a commodity? Why, wood of course! And what does our carpenter make of the wood? Why a table, in all probability a table made of beech wood from a tree cut down in the Chiltern Hills where the legs were also initially turned by the bodgers that peep into Mabey’s tale of beech trees, as most tables in London at the time were made from Chiltern beeches. These justly famous legs not only sit four square on the ground but dance as well, their capers as a commodity performing more wonders to behold than the table turning of mediums. The entire chapter is an essay in religious demystification; man not only creating god but the commodity form as well, which then assume the “fantastic” form of a relation between things. Mabey has scanned the far horizons for references to beech trees, even citing passages from Orwell’s “Keep the Aspidistra Flying”. How come that he missed this reference, then? Though not exactly explicit, it is also rather more than just bordering on the credible. And what a can of worms Chapter 4 opens up. And how necessary it is for all ecologists to read it and take on board what is there revealed and to henceforth treat it as a base line. For without it, we, and vast swathes of nature, are doomed.

Marx began his life’s work with a critique of Hegel’s philosophy of right. “What has this to do with the price of eggs” ecologists might well ask, or at least the pitiful few prepared to take the above approach seriously. Well, it is also a critique of the state and Hegel’s statolatry, mind and nature coming to rest in the state in Hegel's system. Though natural scientists since the mid 19th century have split their sides laughing at Hegel’s “preposterous” philosophy of nature (a presumptuous judgement in any case which is now being questioned, particularly in America), the deification of the state by today’s ecologists, climate scientists etc is equally preposterous and just as metaphysical. By entrusting the future of nature and the human race to the state, this closet Hegelianism works behind their backs, barely one natural scientist even remotely suspecting they are the victims of what is rapidly turning out to be history’s biggest ruse.

As for Mabey, literary imagery becomes actual imagery - tree stumps and the hobgoblins of pollarded trees. Unbeknown to himself he has metamorphosed the truth of literary imagery and the literary past and made into a tree and at the same time rescuing it for science by letting it live. However he then goes too far in the range of literary and painterly references meaning the tree itself becomes a work of art an exhibit a natural gallerification. Mabey – as previously pointed out - really is a gallerista of the wild, a collector of nature’s artefacts, a Guggenheimer of greenery.

Mabey shies away from ever mentioning his radical past when articles written by him in the mid 1960s appeared in the often excellent, New York based “Rebel Worker” via being copied and pasted from the often insipid London based “Peace News”. (In truth, quite superficial appraisals of the 60s growing youth revolt as personified in the Mersey Sound). I can understand why Maybey might not wish to be reminded of the former but not “Peace News”. I also have a very early book of his entitled “Class in Britain” which I got in the hope I just might find an enlightened coming together of class struggle and the battle for nature. Not a whisper and I did actually wonder if there might be another Richard Mabey. In “Beechcombings” he describes in some detail the past history of the repeated attempts to enclose Berkhamstead Common. Matters came to a head in 1865 and fences were torn down in a night raid - just as they had been in 1640 when a local man had led a “disciplined” band of 100 men in an earlier foray, cheered on by 1000s of locals. The adjective is hardly neutral, given the date, and the precision of this military style enterprise reads more like an anticipation of the New Model Army to come. Significantly Maybey’s two direct references to the English Civil War are a shade negative, one regretting the looting of the forests that took place, (much the same happening during the French Revolution,) the other that Epping Forest, after the Civil War, become a place of refuge for former soldiers turned deer hunters - a sort of back to front remake of the Hollywood blockbuster if you like. How would he deal with the Digger, Gerrard Winstanley, one is compelled to ask? Would it be any different to that of W.G. Hoskins and L. Dudley Stamp, joint authors of the New Naturalist” “Common Lands of England and Wales” (1961) and who had been part of the royal commission on Common Land (1955-8)? (This commission marked the moment the matter of the Commons became part of a wider landscape amenity aesthetic and conservation “ethic”, culminating, at the end of the decade, in Nan Fairbrother`s “New Lives, New Landscapes” which positioned this altered perspective in an industrial change-over promising automation and consumer abundance. We can only regret the visionary, revolutionary upheavals of the late sixties were not powerful enough to stamp on the book, for it has a lot to answer for – the chapter “The Disturbed Landscape of Industry” suggesting that it is not merely an eyesore but also akin to a psychological abnormality).

Hoskins was an historian and Dudley Stamp a geographer, neither really kicking against the limits of the academic division of learning. However it was geography that was about to take the most surprising leap forward, and though to Dudley Stamp psychogeography (then taking its first, and best steps) would have been beneath derision, it is implicit in his catching descriptions of the terraced houses of the Welsh valleys “climbing gradually up the hillsides in congestion and disorder to present a specialized industrial landscapes which has become famous or infamous the world over”. To the historian Hoskins, the Commons had throughout their chequered history not only been threatened with “longing commercial eyes” but were confronted with “another attack ---- from an entirely different angle This was the revolutionary movement of the Diggers (who) advocated particularly the ploughing up of the commons and waste land throughout England regardless of the rights of the lord of the manor. He concludes, “This dangerous revolutionary movement was quickly crushed “.

We think it more than likely that Mabey would box clever on this issue and keep his counsel, knowing that to lend his name to such a crass denunciation could be his undoing. However it has to be said we get a better feel of what the Commons were actually like from Hoskins, in particular the fact that the monetary economy was a late arrival on the scene, “money for the majority of English and Welsh people playing only a marginal part in their economy until the early parts of the 19th century". As we are living "in a complete money economy" today, this is hard to grasp given the constant temptation to remake the past in the image of the present, the heritage industry being the final triumph of this unhistorical tendency. One gets the impression reading Mabey’s drawn-out account of Berkhamstead Common that a monetary economy had thrived on the Commons since time immemorial and so had beech wood commodity speculators. Nowhere does he explicitly say that throughout the entire existence of the commons money played only a marginal role in the reproduction of the society of commoners.

Though Hoskins and Dudley Stamp only twice mention Berkhamstead and the battles to retain it as a Common not once, their discussion of rights has an odd Marxist ring to it, as though they were no strangers to the examination of the matter by Marx in “The Critique of the Gotha Programme” taking it upon themselves to develop the critique still further. Where there was an ample supply of land, and especially on the wastes, it was not possible to speak of “common rights” for they had “no need of definition, and therefore could hardly be said to exist”. This absence of definition defines the Commons, though more especially the Wastes, as a place of freedom from constraint upon which everything is permitted and a fool can dethrone a king. When Hoskins declares “where there is no limitation, there can be no rights” an extreme libidinal craving breaks through despite himself, and what is clearly meant to be a colourless statement of the obvious becomes marvellously shadowed with suggestion. It is rather ironic to be reminded that Mabey had written a long article in The Guardian (14/3/09) deeply critical of the lack of engagement he felt in the New Naturalist series of interesting books that dominated nature writing in the decades following the Second World War. Is he not guilty of a greater charge, a more metaphorical approach to nature that yearns to be the thing itself, much as Keats described the infilling of “negative capability” and that paradoxically says more on the plane of objective truth than the commonsense of science, ultimately falling down because of a total absence of a critique of political economy, hints of which we find in the authors of “The Common Lands of England and Wales”?

The ancient commons of Grassington in the North Yorkshire Pennines. The photo on the left is of the limestone pavement on the top of the largely ash tree array of Grass Woood where the only indigenous plant of the lady's slipper orchid remains. On the right is a photo of a wall overgrown with thick moss in Grass Wood proper. Sixty years ago a peculiar, indistinct, sooty-coloured variety of the rare Scotch Argus butterfly - an Arctic species - flew here....

This intense dislike of revolutionary upheaval also shapes Mabey’s attitude to avant-garde art. Going no further than installation art, will he forever be able to keep the hatches battened down on the territory that lies beyond it and which he knows full well is there and just hopes no one will out him over? It is a logical step to take but few are prepared to go that extra mile because everything about their life will change. Never able to fully purge the memory of the past, Mabey dreads radicalism because it embodies his more real self, the one he has been running from for decades. When Mabey trespasses accidentally into a lime wood he describes it as an “intervention”, as though the word has wantonly slipped through the snare in his throat, despite his continuing efforts to tighten the noose on it. Called La Tillaie, it was a reserve biologique in the Fontainebleau Forest, though dedicated to the unmanaged growth of beech rather than lime trees. Would Mabey have done so had he seen the notice beforehand pointing out that La Tillaie was a strict non-intervention zone? What we, and the rest of the English speaking world, now understand by the word is etymologically rooted in French usage. So to make an “intervention” is not mere motion in space and time that thrusts others aside just for the hell of it, but a deliberate, thought out challenge to authority, a provocative act that encourages the common people to take heart and take over. As an invitation to an uprising rather than an opening at a gallery, it clashes head on with the property relations typical of capitalist society. So when Mabey says of this minor act of transgression in Fontainebleau that “I had become an intervention myself, as I had much more aggressively in Hardings Wood” he forgets to add he is the titular owner of Hardings Wood and therefore free to do more or less as he pleases. In Mabey’s hands the vital word becomes emptied of meaning. This was not what was meant by the realisation of art and the setting free of nature that the powerless early 19th century, East Anglian poet John Clare could only yearn for, the enclosing fences torn down in his mind’s eye only.

Now had we, in desperation, taken a chain saw to the encroaching carr woodlands in Healey Mills Marshalling Yards, West Yorks to save the Grayling butterfly, that would have been an “intervention”. Though it would have led to our arrest and a swingeing fine, the situation had potential and might have ended up acutely embarrassing the owners of the yards (now Deutsche Bahn and presumably less thick skinned than the former owners, EWS) but more especially conservation bodies who allegedly are there to protect wild life but fail massively when it comes to brownfield sites. We say “had the potential” to cause profound embarrassment but this is by no means a foregone conclusion. Such a drastic intervention may not have received any publicity at all because the growing rapprochement between conservation groups and the media only serves to stifle all independent criticism and silence dissident voices (like ourselves), despite the latter being numerically easily the largest, and potentially most proactive, constituency. It is the latter, among others, to whom we address our theories and our experiences in practical action.

Above: a burnt out carriage in Healey Mills Marshalling Yards and photo right, a grayling butterfly

Mabey as the titular owner of Hardings Wood sensibly has allowed the place to become the property of a village trust. I’m unable to own a piece of nature because I simply don’t have the money. But in the highly unlikely event of ever being left any money and with no dependants, perhaps I too would want to purchase an uncoppiced wood, a piece of a spoil heap or quarry and see what I could do with it in terms of creating a variety of habitats and attracting wild life. Meanwhile I am very much a member of that unsung band that goes around giving nature a hand and is constantly knocked back. Virtually all my guerrilla seeding and planting has come to nothing: whether mown down or pulled up or whatever, it has all been destroyed in one way or another. More than disheartening, it flattens a person. It occurs with such devastating regularity it is beginning to seem like it is fated to happen. It is as if all our efforts are being monitored on CCTV, a panel of invigilators then sending out a swat team dedicated to ensuring that nothing is allowed to regenerate of its own accord but must be covered with evergreen aliens and then mulched to stop native weeds from appearing. Every bit of trefoil that we have planted around Shipley station on the outskirts of Bradford to extend the threatened Common Blue population has literally been ground into the dirt it thrives on, if left alone. However, for a couple of years our efforts did meet with success and for the first time ever we succeeded in drawing the Blue across the Bradford beck, “t` mucky beck” as it is known locally. With no one to lend a helping hand, it is a lone, thankless task though if something drastic is not done in the immediate future, the butterfly is doomed to die out at the station.

Conservationist bodies do not like individuals taking matters into their own hands. That way they lose control, their unwritten motto being “everything within the party nothing outside it”. I had intended to write “organisation” rather than “party” but what came out instead is very telling. For we find members of conservationist parties have something of the apparatchik about them. This control fetish is also a property fetish and the fact that all our planting involved trespassing means it is therefore illegal and to be doubly condemned. Conservationism profoundly mirrors the society we live in and is riven by an us and them of believers and sceptics, of representatives and the betrayed represented whose “stakeholding” is much weaker and therefore far more open to the idea that we must be rid of the reservation mentality and all that implies. We go to look at a reservation or SSSI in a frame of mind akin to that of visiting a museum or gallery or any staged performance. We must begin to envelop ourselves in nature, approach it with hands, feet, spades, hammers, saws, as well as eyes, prepared, this time, to work with nature rather than against it. We must cease to seat ourselves before it as we would a TV, treat it as easy viewing in the confident expectation it will perform as requested and at the time of our choosing. Looking at nature has made us blind to it.

To take the theatre out of nature so we might better grasp it comes at the end of a long development that has its origins in classical German philosophy. Appearing in 1849, the explorer Von Humboldt’s “Ansichten der Natur” was the apogee of one particular strand arising out of this tangled skein in which art and nature are intertwined and which essentially sets the scene for today’s pretty pretty, natural history aesthetic. For these “pictures of nature” were aesthetic presentations of research into natural science and geography that Von Humboldt honed up into a dazzling series of lectures and which won him a worldwide following. These polished performances also suggested a new approach to travel as opposed to the fearsome privations of the voyage, the comfort of the planned tour, the travelogue and leisure cruiser taking the place of the “floating coffins” which were the sailors names for Darwin’s “The Beagle” sister ships.

Hegel would have undoubtedly objected to Von Humboldt’s “pictures” because surface appearances were only part of the story. Much in the same way, Faust longed for a philosophy and praxis that transcended the dead objectivity of the solely contemplative and the disunity between knowledge of nature and human nature. His first step in Faust Part One was to explicitly reject the notion of drama as simply denoting a play, bending it to mean something far wider. I merely cite the latter not in order to show off, but so that conservationists may begin to take us more seriously. And so to conclude this lengthy digression on Mabey, suffice to say this has never been his problem but it is ours, just as our praxis of conservation is profoundly different and basically at loggerheads with his and the entire conservation Cominterm.

So is it possible to neatly sum this guy up? Richard Mabey as a young man with flair liked the razzmatazz of the mid 1960s - what blues shouter George Melly referred to as revolt into style – a relatively mild-mannered non conformity that also occasionally nurtured an often astounding radical expression quickly following on its heels; one which demanded the world be turned upside down. It was a vision of total social revolution. And pronto! We guess that Mabey was flummoxed by much of this. Nay more; he probably hated it and he probably hated all the people like us who tried to practise a situationist critique. Mabey’s turn to nature throughout the 1970s was also a retreat from the uproar as he couldn’t even countenance social ecology a la Murray Bookchin never mind a critique of art and the state and nearly everything else beside. Suffering from periodic nervous collapse – an inevitable by-product of intensifying alienation – Mabey sought in nature quiet, contemplative ponderings and solitude, looking for a wholesome fulfilment that forever escaped his grasp; a deflected eros that we have more than a little sympathy for, as it also soothes our furrowed brows. Ineluctably though the great themes of revolt slunk through the cool, dark woods and crept through the back door of his country cottage. Maybey had to confront them or rather, he made it his business not to confront them, deflecting them into cul-de-sacs of fine sounding phraseology and prose which on the surface look so profound but end up meaning little. The guy cannot be crude, he cannot forthrightly hate the system, and as for the very word capitalism, why it is an ugly expressive description to be avoided at all cost. Above all, Mabey has no faith in a liberatory uprising of ‘the people’. The bald truth is that elusive but utterly essential revolution of the green, red and black combined is not for the likes of an English gentleman naturalist who sees in such an uprising something of Edmund Burke’s “swineish multitude” nowadays given added value by an hysterical media that views all of us at the sharp end as part and parcel of a psychotically maimed collective. Mabey baby you should first pronounce on the real psychotics who administer and promote this end game suicide capitalism?

Stuart Wise with help from bro’: Late Summer, 2009

The above is also prelude to the critique of Maybey’s erstwhile friend, eco artist Andy Goldsworthy who despite all his self-serving images to the contrary, is the person most responsible for an even greater invasion of value and monetarisation of nature, especially through the paid for up front concept of an aestheticised nature walk and counterpart to an eco tourism more expensive than any banal, humdrum, cheap and nasty, swimming pool vacation in Lanzarotti.

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20/20 vision in William Hazlitt's Maidstone and a short addendum

........The discovery of a fold made of beech trees.........

Quite by accident we discovered this fold made from beech trees on a piece of waste ground known locally as 20/20 in Maidstone, Kent. The land now belongs to Wimpey's and planning permission had been granted for yet another suburban atrocity when like a deus ex machina, the credit crunch struck and so the brownfield site was, at least temporarily, saved from predation.

Chancing on the site was a transforming experience and made our day. We had passed what we took to be a beech coppice several times without paying it that much attention, except to unconsciously note for a large beech it did look rather squat lacking the height, if not the breadth, of a mature beech. Stooping beneath the low-slung branches that concealed the trunk from view, we were surprised to find ourselves confronted with a palisade of beeches. We immediately thought the beeches had once formed the boundary of an ancient path but shimmying between the close set trunks we were even more amazed to find we had entered a dark, rectangular enclosure bounded on all sides by beech trees. Except where the light was able to break through the canopy in the centre of the fold, there was no other woodland vegetation apart from decaying beech leaf litter and therefore not that untypical of beech woods generally. This geometric, malfunctioning naturalness had taken on a life of its own and instantly caught our imaginations, for we had never seen anything remotely like it before. A fold constructed entirely of beech trees must be virtually unique, surely? Why beech, why not fast growing hawthorn (“quickthorn”), for there was plenty of hawthorn on the 20/20 site?

We instantly began to notice other irregularities. In the gloom there appeared to be a glowing crystal of considerable size. A bag of white cement perhaps that had been left outside in the rain? On closer inspection it turned out to be a shattered ball of gypsum, strewn fragments scintillating from beneath the decaying vegetation. Where had the quartz come from? Perhaps the cement works located some distance outside of Maidstone? Strangest of all, though, were a large number of buried plant pots, their terracotta rims just to say visible and which we would have overlooked had not the strangeness of the place quickened our perception. An illicit marijuana plot? Hardly, for very little could grow in these sunlight-starved shadows. There was also an abandoned plough and an old wrought iron gate which a blacksmith must have fashioned in the late 19th century. It was now laying on the ground where it once had stood upright in the only gap in the four-sided figure of beech trees. Rough cyclists had practised in the clearing, a series of earthen ramps having been thrown up and which are now becoming rapidly grassed over. The cyclists have now moved on to a patch of sandy ground outside of the pill box.. Someone has sprayed “local” on it as if this was an alternative, criminal Tesco's owing to the numbers of shopping trolleys that had been dumped around it. By the side of the pill box there are a couple of cherry trees with branches that have been rived off, this delinquent 'pollarding' contrasting with the traces of 'legitimate' pollarding in the rows of beeches back in the hidden fold. However the fold could not have been much more than 150 years old and by then pollarding was going out of fashion as coal replaced wood as the commoners' household fuel, and iron began to take the place of wood in buildings for industrial use, the construction of machine frames and in ships and barges etc. Henceforth, in addition to becoming objects of scientific study as more was learnt about trees in one decade than in the entire previous history of dendrology, trees would increasingly be aestheticized and revered for their intrinsic beauty as art aspired to break through representation and be life itself. As absorbers of CO2, rather than just providers of oxygen, only latterly have trees proved to be more functional and necessary to mankind than ever, a necessity however that, up to a point, proscribes their centuries old utilisation: rightful tree worship has finally rid itself of pagan crankiness, found its corresponding science and come of age.

The fold (on reflection intended for pigs rather than sheep, goats, cattle or horses) may actually have been a beech coppice that was traditionally foraged by pigs and this had been chopped down piece-meal over time. The commoners' rights of pannage for swine in Kent - the Andredsweald - reached back to the 8th century. Any beech mast that had taken root may well have been grubbed out and then planted in straight rows. If wood anemones and dogs mercury, both specifically woodland plants, appear in spring, then almost certainly we are dealing with a ghost wood that has been made-over and aligned into a pig pen. We looked for signs of other trees between the individual beeches but found none, so presumably a temporary fence cut from the nearby hawthorn had once protected the newly planted hedge. Once the beech trees had gained in girth, the hedge would have withstood any amount of rough treatment by pasture animals.

(Though, in the scale of pasture animal values, the pig ranked below that of the milk cow, it was above that of the goose and it was the fate of the goose more than any other “farm yard animal”- the notion of the farmyard was a consequence of enclosure- that sparked revolt. It was not the pig but the goose that prompted the inspired, anonymous, couplet that has resounded down the centuries and just too acute and stinking of muck for any self styled poet: “they hang the man and woman that steals the goose from off the common /but lets the greater villain loose that steals the common from the goose”. We have lost sight of the fact the goose once was a life and death issue for the poorer commoners summed up in the lapsed popular saying someone’s “goose is cooked” meaning they’d completely had it. The dreams of the poorest burst with excess and the commoners desire for untold riches and freedom from toil was centred on the “goose that lays the golden eggs” and a good layer that nurtured her goslings eventually evolved into the Mother Goose of Xmas pantomimes, theatre but a poor substitute for the lost dramatic significance of domesticated wild fowl)

The oddity of the Maidstone denaturalised wood (see the addendum to MABEY BABY) somewhat helped compensate for a desolating absence of song birds and insects on this waste ground that could well have once have been common land. Three sun filled days in mid September, 2009 with sound carrying for miles on the motionless air, and all we saw were several Common Sympetrums, one female Common Aeshna, one Comma, one Small Copper and at most three Speckled Woods. We remarked on the absence of wasps, bees, hover flies but especially crane flies, unable to spot even one daddy long legs, though in truth we opted not to look too closely, preferring to remain blind. In nearby suburban gardens the diadem or garden spiders appeared to be doing well, but one couldn’t help feel that this was an aberration and that it did not indicate a recovering eco system. But this is the position that has been adopted by Buglife and the British Arachnological Society, duplicating the dangerous hyperbole of the billion Painted Ladies that purportedly would, in a spectacular reverse migration, be winging their way to warmer climes in late summer.

No other explanation was ever offered for the seeming large number of arachnids. Helped by the decline in insectivorous birds, spider eating wasps, frogs and even flies, could it be that the chain of predation has broken down, allowing more spiders to reach maturity than is customarily the case? The larder appeared to be all but bare when we came to examine garden spider webs in the second week of October, these intact, tensile and empty orbs showing only a barren assortment of leaves, down, dust particles and the odd winged aphid. Though this may seem far fetched, a comparable scenario is infolding in drought-ridden East Africa. Big cats are also doing well there because stricken herbivores are very easy prey. Of course we would know nothing of this if all we had to go on was David Attenborough's shameful "life" (first screened on Oct 12th 2009) which began in Kenya and showed an example of cooperative behaviour, three leopards joining forces to bring down an ostrich. The series was three years in the making so there can be no excuse in pleading ignorance regarding a drought that has ravaged East Africa for five years with Kenya, and neighbouring countries, the first to be almost totally burnt to a frazzle by climate change. With this in mind “Life” (though “Death” would be a better title) did not come across as a scientific record but rather as invitation to a wild life safari and was therefore advertising at its most deceitful.

Attenborough is a master of the black arts of pseudo conservation and honorary president of Butterfly Conservation [BC], chosen on account of his celebrity status and unrivalled capacities as a salesman of nature. This year BC and the Independent newspaper got together and came up with the hard sell of “Butterfly Summer”. In fact this partnership was an ecological bogoff - join BC and the Independent was yours for free for one year.

On July 25th the Independent's environmental editor Michael McCarthy foamed that we were in the “middle of one of Britain’s most extraordinary butterfly summers – with a billion butterflies of one species about to take wing----presenting people with a chance to spot butterflies in greater numbers than have been seen in Britain for years”. What pernicious nonsense! One butterfly, no matter how many there are of one species (in this instance, the Painted Lady) hardly makes a “butterfly summer”. Nearly six weeks later the same sentiments were echoed in the Guardian (4/9/09) with a journalist claiming he “had been amazed by the swarms of butterflies that I believed only existed in the hyperbolic imagination of Victorian lepidopterists” adding “the summer of 2009 has witnessed one of the greatest Painted Lady migrations in living memory”. Both journalists appear to have been suffering from the same hallucination brought on by the editorial enforcing of wishful thinking, because, in our view, there have not been that many Painted Ladies on the wing either in the north or south, certainly not in comparison to the great invasion of over a decade ago when it was possible to pick Painted Lady larvae off thistles growing up through cracks in the pavement of inner London and Silverdale Moss in Morecambe Bay was one mass of writhing larvae. Come October 2009, even the BBC's “Autumnwatch” began to have their doubts: where were all the expected millions - even billion - second generation Painted Ladies? No one dared say it was not much more than hype from the very start. And so this perplexing ecological mystery needed to be solved and perhaps we the viewers had the answer! And there had to be an answer – if not some knowing wiseacre might begin to compare this piece of inflationary nature hype with the fictive bubbles generated by a stagnating capitalism founded on the advertising of brands (or butterflies) and the spinning of wilder and wilder fantasies.

As the Independent’s environmental Editor Michael McCarthy, of all people, should have exercised restraint. In an article for the Independent on April 21st 2008 he wrote of the alarming decline of birds migrating between Africa and Europe, this profound motion having long been “recognised as one of the worlds most magnificent natural phenomena on the scale of the Gulf Stream and the Indian monsoon. On the 22nd of March, 2009 reviewing a book titled “Say goodbye to the Cuckoo” by John Murray he wrote of his unease, of something troubling he could not put his finger on, of spring as we know it coming to an end, of something so momentous “that perhaps it is better not to think it through”. Fortunately for the Independent's environmental editor “Butterfly Summer” saved him from having to do that and bland conservationism is once more the order of the day. The majority of conservation yap is today filtered through the media with cash strapped editors and program directors pressuring journalists into writing up-beat assessments against their better judgement, just as if they were preparing a company report prior to a shareholders meeting.

In this media transect they clutch at numbers (numbers in organisations, numbers of individual species, numbers of consumers of nature - everywhere the hunt is on to increase the number -) never once stopping to ask what do the numbers actually mean, for their jobs would be on the line if they did so. And wild life conservation charities ever anxious not to alienate the middle ground, in the last analysis unequivocally support this bad practise - despite the occasional quibble of a conscious stricken member who is then silenced by being ignored, (or maybe judged a bit touched), rather than asked to leave.

Even more insidiously than their advertising counterparts (for it is expected of them) the bio-numerati have, almost without exception, fallen into the trap of hyping the one swallow that makes a summer in ad land but certainly not in nature. So number begins to substitute for genuine biodiversity and becomes bioperversity, the main aim of the language of advertising being to inflate expectations and the myth of possession, the ceaseless wanting rather than the actual holding. Selling dreams as reality, the consumer imaging of nature as abundance rather than dearth, works just so long just so long as we remain separated from nature, either as viewers or tourists to earth centres and pricey nature hospices like the St Albans butterfly house, made all the more agonizing because not one voice has been raised in protest against it, in fact very much the opposite. Only if we resist the controlling images of nature will we begin to get anywhere.

A language inevitably accompanies the financialization of nature that comes straight from theatre, film, gallery or music reviews. Briefly viewing the BBC's “Autumnwatch” before I could stand it no longer and had to switch off, I was forcibly struck by hack literary expressions like “natural theatre”, “incredible drama” and then show biz head liners like “Battle of the Titans”, “King of the Green” etc. to describe the red deer rut. At one point a nature presenter (Chris - Crisp Packet - Packham) accused another (Simon King) of “trying to out-orchestrate” him. Continually assaulted with jargon like “nature's harvest”, “autumn's incredible riches”, autumn was being constrained to live up to its stereotype, as though Keats' “Ode to Autumn” had been especially composed for the show. Rather than seeking to express the alarming reality of today’s out of kilter autumn in which birds are nesting and fields of poppies blooming for the second time, language was here deployed as a tool to style a conventional autumn, the one sanctified by tradition, the cosy autumn of fireside chats and church harvest festivals.

Of course, these presenters know a lot about nature and their facts and experiences are often very interesting but there again so are ours and all others immersed in nature that have no profile or position in society. For the last two centuries at least, there’s been tension between the specialists (often writers) and the field naturalists (quaintly referred to as "professionals and amateurs") though neither could get by without the other; a living testimony if you like to that vibrant democracy nature forces on us – intimated perhaps again in Keats’ “grand democracy of forest trees” – a concept ever beckoning towards greater enrichment. Have we now reached the moment when there may be a greater coming together involving the questioning of the very existence of money, the state, the suburbanisation of life and a omniscient trivial consumption bringing about the end of all the eco-systems which so much life depends on? In short, a coming together to combat the era of suicide capitalism.

The creation of an artificial language that shapes rather than reflects reality, is greatly aided by the fact that nature is increasingly experienced as a media representation, one we are guided through by professional presenters and ‘unworldly’ falsifiers like David Attenborough as if they alone know the path to nature's holy grail, a nature unspoiled by the devastation wrought by capitalism. Sir David has now acquired the status of a national treasure. Revered to the point of worship even by the likes of Johnny Rotten, to be even mildly critical of this nature royal is to be guilty of the crime of lese-majesté. As the nature illusionist, he has rightly incurred the censure of George Monbiot but who then typically retracts and praises the man - however in a way that totally damns Sir David, once the connotation of his remark are properly understood and whose true meaning obviously escapes Monbiot. Godlike in that St David can do no wrong “in the eyes of all who worship him” he is godlike in another sense in that “he has created a world which did not exist before”.

A comment like this could have rolled off the pen of a Schelling or even the far harder-headed Hegel. Dialectical idealism aside, also present in this categorical statement is the romantic dream of ultimate artistry, the desire to create life and replace “god”. Translated into today’s environment it amounts to saying that without Sir David nature does not exist and, what's more, can only do so in the presence of celebrity, for this is now its conditio sine qua non. Forget cameramen and women, production teams, production editors, operations managers and what not, (actually all irrelevant save the former), this is more than just the appropriation of other peoples efforts typical of captains of industry or those erstwhile “masters of the universe”, the financiers. No longer just a knight of the realm, Sir David has now become a demiurge that creates the universe we are in! Every bubble is more an outrage against common sense, more of an anti-gravity event than the last, so now is the time to float the possibility of a nature bubble, a Planet Earth become an ark of re-engineered nature.

In order to retain their credibility, nature celebrities like Attenborough have begun to pepper their broadcasts with calls for action as though they were saying something shockingly radical, the incantatory effect of this word sweeping all before it like magic. But really it is a call for more talks at the political level, for talks about talks until the incendiary word has been robbed of all meaning by talktalk. Action as envisaged by Sir David is inaction, a motionless form of motion, an impotent declamation on the stage of world politics such as the December 2009 Copenhagen Conference on climate change will undoubtedly turn out to be and which more perceptive, though hardly radical, commentators already acknowledge to be the case (see, for instance Guardian 29/9/09 “The last chance to save the world: long, contradictory and impenetrable”) The last thing Sir David wants is for people to take matters into their own hands and act for themselves. This is the only way to save nature and is also rapidly bound to reconnect with a past which has been smothered in forgetfulness and drowned in calumny when people did take to the streets and could make a difference.

In the interim, as never before, celebrity became a displaced praxis, an alienated form of empowerment based on the renunciation of self and a symptom of increased dispossession such that nothing is achievable without the presence of celebrity. So omnipresent is the infatuation with celebrity that not so long ago Butterfly Conservation organised butterfly walks along the south coast of England with each step of the way guided by a different celebrity! By virtue of being a celebrity they knew everything about butterflies and gave life to them. So much for the little things that run the earth. Without a parasitic superstructure it seems they can’t! Today there is nothing a celebrity can’t fix from curing world poverty, negotiating with the Taliban, sorting out the Middle East to finding a cure for cancer. Their collective, gargantuan, though self-serving aims, reminds one of the hopes that formerly were invested, for much sounder reasons, in the workers and non-workers’ movement. And ultimately it all boils down to money, the need to justify it, even appearing to give it away (“we owe it to humanity”) in order to double up on income later, once the media publicity has done its work by keeping a celebrities name in circulation. And that is why Sir David Rottenborough has to predate the word “action” and render it extinct through over kill. His unspoilt, not of this world, vision of nature he seeks to project is ultimately directed to preserving the status quo, to conserving the money economy and a dreamlike nature rather than a down and dirty nature for an anonymous majority that has temporarily lost sight of itself, the worship of celebrity a major part of this self-denying ordinance. And only in so far as the eco-constituency is prepared to transgress, and not do as it's told, will it begin to understand this and act upon it.

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Not only is the eco movement in desperate need of a relevant critique of capitalism, it is also totally wanting in a critique of the state. Because of this, actions that have the potential to cut loose from the state and capitalism can fast get bogged down in the quick sands of the state that will ensure they come to nothing, though admittedly it is far from easy to keep the two apart as the state will always shadow a threatening social movement and seek to do everything it can to integrate it if it cannot destroy it directly. No one in their right minds can expect Sir David to initiate a discussion of the role of the state because, like all big name ecos', he is incapable of even beginning to see that the state is a huge problem and that a nature liberated from capitalism is also a nature liberated from the state. He couldn’t even contribute intelligently to a discussion on how the conservationist state arises out of voluntary initiatives beginning more or less in the 1920s which are then promoted by radio and national newspapers in particular, the conservation of nature eventually forming part of a broader national plan of strict town and country planning laws, welfare agencies and the nationalisation of basic industries, all designed to preserve capitalism and make it function 'properly' by correcting, once and for all, free market anarchy. Though Sir David is aware that if we get out of kilter with the natural world “the associated emotional, spiritual and physical loss is the road to madness” he does not see that the nature tradition in this country is infused with a hidden radicalism of great subterranean power and that the extraordinary pre-eminence of natural history in these islands kicks off when its founding father, John Ray, refuses around 1660 to swear an oath of allegiance to the state in matters of conscience. Thus from the very start, modern natural history in England is stamped with liberty and a resistance to state tyranny, though as time passes it tends to increasingly become an underground current. Though a very broad one, it is reluctant to show its teeth and is inclined, like all underground movements, to whisper rather than bark, fearful of making its presence known and only roaring out of earshot.

The Attenborough files, with nature a distinct second, are now to be made available on line in the BBC web archive. It has been hailed as “a massive online experiment” with fresh clips, between two and eight minutes long, uploaded everyday. The streaming of film on the internet is increasing by leaps and bounds so why call it “a massive on line experiment”? How will success be measured? By the number of hits a hit counter registers? Or will success be measured to the degree the consumption of digitised images replaces actual nature? If digitised viewing becomes an end in itself then there is no need to conserve nature, for the proxy more than improves on the tedium of the original that fails to bite when we want it to or hides beneath a leaf or won't come out of its cave. Rather than the key to appreciating the diversity of life, this aesthetic Darwinism selects only the best shots. And why stop here? Why not eventually offer the opportunity to remix nature as we think fit and make up our own cryptozoology as we go? Interactive media is still in its early stages but dreams of becoming digital biology. So what better way to compensate for the disappearance of nature than by inventing our own? This we can ‘print’ out in a backyard biofactory and then set free to maraud like a vengeful chimera straight out of the pages of Lautreamont's “Songs of Maldoror? Though still only a distant possibility there is many a true word spoken in jest. Attenborough is on record as saying “urbanization (means) people are increasingly out of touch with the natural world” but that the great remedy is TV that has “an obligation to keep people informed of what is going on”! Search far and wide and it is difficult to find anything that remotely can compare with this Delphic banality and that has to be a candidate for the most stupid utterance ever.

From fairly modest beginnings, the BBC’s Natural History Film Unit has become enormously influential over the past 25 years, commanding a worldwide audience - and franchise. The standard format is tailored to the demands of television and never lasts longer than an hour and typically makes maximum use of a more or less lone presenter, David Atttenborough becoming the first nature celebrity to achieve international renown. Though the world hegemony of the made–for-TV Natural History Unit is not at risk, it is now facing a challenge from the “big screen”. Disney is back again, this time selling more of a space/time experience than the earlier fare of appealing bed time stories that were the despair of serious naturalists and the butt of satirists. The new company is called “DisneyNature” and was formed after the screening – a few years back - of Attenborough’s “Planet Earth” in the States, Disney responding to the series success by setting up its specialist nature division. The company’s first release in the US was simply called “Earth” – a full length version of “Planet Earth”, meaning it was a once-and-for-all viewing experience with no subsequent episodes to be screened over the following weeks. Over the next five years “DisneyNature” intends releasing a film a year, the first , “Crimson Wing” a “lyrical study of flamingos living on Lake Natron in Tanzania”, the second , the sub aquatic “Adventure Ocean” (why not promote it as “experience total immersion”?) and the third, “Naked Beauty” about the job pollinators do but which wont mention that in 2007 there was a 31% loss of bee colonies in California and so will intentionally fall far short of the Naked Truth.

The other factor behind the founding of the company was the runaway success of the French film “March of the Penguins” which when released in the States in 2005 grossed a staggering $77m. As the British director of “Crimson Wing”, Matthew Eberhard said, the French film “made things possible because other people saw they could make money out of it”. Though the emphasis of “DisneyNature” is upon an immersive experience – Eberhard said of “Crimson Wing” “we wanted it to be a project that people can’t experience on television (by helping) give one the feeling that they could be there” - he also added that “we’re trying to tell more of a story line than a standard wildlife film”. Are we back to the old Disney ways or will the narratives strive to be more faithful to nature and seek to reflect its truth? Some hope of that, matey! Eberhard has confessed to finding himself “getting quite bored with television wildlife programmes” a view we would readily agree but which he then immediately negates by declaring they lack artistry “big screen productions giving one a little more artistic leeway” i.e. code for artistic license and all the crap that goes with it. Frankly to find Attenbrough’s approach preachy, and proselytising because it “tells people what to do” is to be deaf, dumb and blind to the low key box of artistic tricks from out of which the series is constructed and the equally insidious “do nothing” message that goes with it. Other than chucking the TV out and going back to dial-up, we cannot, all that easily, disconnect ourselves from this increasingly universal form of smothering, academic, nature entertainment that is now so predictable, repetitious and formulaic that we take about as much notice of it as the air we breathe it is so omnipresent. In fact it is only a superior form of Disney, a staging post for Hollywood, a bloc buster in abeyance. The cunning of artifice resides in its capacity to slam the door shut on the absolute need to make that imaginative leap that leaves the editing of nature behind and goes to its actual defence on the field of the battle for nature. The spectacle of the fullness of nature is part of this sinister stratagem: why save when nature’s credit is unlimited?

In tandem with the financialization of nature, the BBC’s Natural History Unit has become increasingly capitalised. The days are long gone when a naturalist husband and wife team would live out their days in a tiny caravan parked on Spurn Point in the Humber estuary sparingly using the film they could ill afford to buy, so pitiful was their income from the BBC. We also yearn for the vérité of George Cansdale and “Animal Magic” when animals bit keepers and went berserk in the studio. On the spot where once stood an outhouse to nowhere there is now a career ladder. And nowhere has this been made more explicit than in the Unit’s dealings with everyone’s favourite animal of the moment, the Meerkat.

Twenty years ago Attenborough produced “Meerkats United” which subsequently was voted the most popular nature documentary of all time. It was made by James Honeybourne who had just joined the BBC’s Natural History Film Unit. He has since gone on to ‘better’ things and is now the director and “brains” behind “Meerkats-the Movie” which is backed by the Weinstein Bros and narrated by the deceased Paul Newman. In the New Disney the presenter has become a voice, though not just any old voice for only an instantly recognisable one will do. The voice we hear on the American version of “March of the Penguins” is that of Morgan Freeman and Whoopi Goldberg narrates on “Meerkat Manor”, the film that will go head to head with “Meerkat - the Movie”.

The original “Meerkat Manor”, (narrated by Bill Nighy of the abysmal “Love Actually”), was an animal soap and the first of its kind and became a hit both sides of the Atlantic. Produced by Oxford Scientific Films with support from the BBC, TV ratings showed it had as many viewers as “Eastenders” and “Coronation Street”. It was originally the brainchild of Tim Clutton-Brock, an animal behaviourist and head of evolutionary biology in the University of Cambridge, who had been carrying out an extensive study into the lives of Meerkats for more than ten years. Using a LAN system of miniature cameras linked to computers to aid the team’s investigation, at some point or other the penny dropped the footage could be turned into a new kind of serial movie and franchises used to fund further research. “Nature” selected for, processed and digitally remastered into a “somewhat art” is here used as a form of pop art futures trading and economic prop to underwrite science. (Note how the funding of science has become increasingly dependent on the amount of exposure it receives in the media and whether research can be digitally imaged. The Independent of the 6th October 2009 carried, on its front page, a striking photo of a human embryo to focus attention on the fact that all research on the creation of animal-human “hybrid” embryos had been refused funding).

In the feature length movie of “Meerkat Manor”, reconstructions and special effects have been employed - and the drama upped. As the Independent (15th October 2009) put it “Honeybourne’s film draws one animal’s life in to a tear jerking coming of age drama”. The anthropomorphic views of Konrad Lorenz have been aired once more to explain our attraction to Meerkats, Lorenz arguing that humans react positively to animals that resemble babies because we are hard wired to do so. However, in later life, Lorenz became a victim of what he had initially struggled so hard against and his malignant brand of sociobiology led to a facile projection of human responses onto the animal kingdom, and vice versa, Lorenz crudely justifying fascism as “animal” in origin because, through the study of animals, we “discover facts which strengthen the basis for the care of our holiest, racial, volkish and human heredity”! How very cudddlesome! In his book “The Year of the Greylag Goose” (1979) Lorenz spoke of one bird’s “scorned mistress”, another’s “unfaithful mate” and a goose’s “dumbstruck grief” at the loss of his beloved. Reviewing the book in “Natural History” magazine, a zoologist wondered, “How did this soap opera get into a book on geese?”(For further comments see “The Encyclopaedia of Evolution” by Richard Milner). Other than the maintenance of the status quo the sociobiological art we are discussing has no political agenda beyond that of keeping us fixated on the media, dumbed down, with the freedom to choose and enjoy more channels than ever before and that has now become the essence /definition of the good life.

Having mentioned one of the “big three” ethologists or behavioural naturalists (Lorenz, Von Frisch and Tinbergen), I am reminded of another exhaustive study of animal behaviour. Under the guidance of Niko Tinbergen, beginning in 1952, Kittiwakes on the Farne Islands were put under the spotlight for several years by another husband and wife team, Esther and Michael Cullen. Then the phrase “under the spotlight” was merely a rhetorical flourish, whereas nowadays it would mean the Kittiwakes had been singled out for the Meerkat treatment. Rinsed by media exposure, their identity, as Kittiwakes, would be subtly erased, softening them up so they could be remade by the marketing men. We would, for instance, give the birds names, like they were a troupe of actors, to prepare them for their debut on the world stage. In “Meerkat Manor” there were several clans, or mobs - the Whiskers, the Lazuli, the Commandos, the Starskys, the Zappas, staffed with soldiers like Frank (geddit?), Hannibal, Zaphod, Mitch, Houdini, Punk, Mozart, Carlos, Nikita, Wilson, Shane etc. So from this to Count Orlov of “compare the market/meerkat.com” is only a short step for mediaman – but one giant step for Meerkats. Though the ad that has been heaped with industry awards and remixed in virals that has Count Orlov watching porn, the Meerkats grooming essentially begins with Attenborough - and ends with regular updates on Count Orlov`s twitter feed and flick album. It’s that simples.

Back on the Farnes off the coast of Northumberland, Michael Cullen sought to capture the Kittiwakes display on film whilst Esther carried out her tireless observations from a windbreak erected perilously close to the cliff edge. Today there would be a network of leads, digital observation replacing actual observation. The hair raising risks that once were part of fieldwork and gave it that special, electrifying umph has been largely superseded by computer fed armchair observation, which, though it can be just as canny, do not force upon a person that life-enhancing spirit of adventure and carelessness of personal safety that animated the old naturalists.

I have seen snatches of the film shot by Michael Cullen, and which though absorbing, has not struck me to anything like the same extent as the regular appearance on Tyne Tees Television of Kittiwakes nesting on the Tyne Bridge. Would prolonged observation reveal subtle differences in behaviour when compared with the behaviour of Kittiwakes on the cliffs of the Farnes? The regularity of a machined environment does affect animal behaviour and it takes some adjusting too, like the garden bird Julian Huxley observed that persisted in trying to build a nest on each rung of a ladder despite the fact the nest fell to the ground every time. In nature there are no such regularities, the bird tricked into thinking the ladder was a tree, and the rungs, branches. Similarly I feel particularly miffed that I have not been able to follow up my observations on the Grayling in Healey Mills Marshalling Yards in West Yorkshire and examine further the butterfly’s relationship to rusting railway lines and points levers, the peeling cream paint of the latter giving them a flaking, blotched appearance not unlike that of the bark of a silver birch which Graylings traditionally like to rest on- and rather warmer, moreover, because of the heat retentive properties of metal. But no, dumb fuck authority decided the yard looked better with the old, buckling, railway lines and rotting sleepers pulled up and carted off. I did notice in 2009 that their has been a reversion to type and that the Grayling is returning once more to hug the birches that fringe what used to be the colony’s centre. A marvellous opportunity has been irretrievably lost without one conservation body giving a damn.

The urban Kittiwakes are the only thing that would persuade me to visit Newcastle’s quayside. However, once there, I would wander down to take a look at the Eye Bridge and then sadly reflect does anyone know the real origin of this metaphorical, body-part, construction which goes back to 1968/69 and Raf Fulcher`s brilliant reconstruction of Tatlin’s Ornithopter in dingy basement premises in Newcastle. We did not know it then but this talisman was the herald of a fundamental change about to take place in Newcastle and that, far fetched as it does sound, eventually would have a colossal impact on the regions industrial base, easily as big, and certainly more consequential, than Parsons Turbinia on show in Exhibition Park. This construction was just a part, and a recuperative part at that, of a tide of advanced revolutionary thinking then sweeping Newcastle that sought to transform everyday life in its entirety. Unable to remotely achieve its goal, this profound, encepahlous movement that was almost immediately brutally stamped on, would eventually reap the ironic harvest of aestheticisation the city is now noted for. Everywhere we go in present day Newcastle we see the inverted image of what we were about all those years ago. For the moment its more avant-garde, conceptual conservatism has been overlain by an even greater orthodoxy, that of traditional theatre and the musical epitomized by the runaway success of Lee Hall’s “Billy Elephant” and “The Pitman Painters” in the West End and on Broadway. When Melvyn Bragg, that consummate philistine of encyclopaedic scope, interviewed Hall on TV there was no mention of the most knowing painting ever produced by the Ashington miners, which was of a public urinal in Wallsend. Containing a hidden reference to Duchamp’s Urinal, potentially it could have opened a can of worms and pointed the archaic debate more in our direction. (Again in this respect take a look at “A Malicious Dunciad in Newcastle” elsewhere on this web).

And so once more to the brownfield Kittiwakes of the Tyne Bridge. Urban yes, but they are not yet urbane. And to become that they require the services of an artist. But it doesn’t have to be that of a film crew, editor and producer taking instructions from an increasingly art conscious animal behaviourist. It can be like what happened in Folkestone on the south coast just as the noughties economic crash was getting under way. The Folkestone Triennial, curated by Andrea Schlieker, is a three yearly “time and space” exhibition, the first taking place in the summer of 2008. All the usual names were to be found with their noses in the trough - Emin, Deller, Wallinger…..and Marc Dion an LA artist who had constructed(or rather had made- which actually is an important qualification, for today’s conceptual artists typically cannot bang a nail in) a Mobile Gull Appreciation Unit in the shape of a giant seagull. This staffed unit was a clearing house for information about the “evolution, ethology, natural history environmental status and folklore of these remarkable birds”, Dion announcing in a masterly statement of the obvious that “Gulls are the most conspicuous non-human denizens of Folkestone”. Conceptual artists valorise just by looking and eco artist are no exception, the observation of nature now coming with a price tag attached.

Andrea Schlieker had been called in by the Town Council to head an arts led re/degeneration of Folkestone though in fact all the Council did was rubber stamp the Creative Foundation set up by Roger De Haan, a resident of Folkestone and chair of its most successful business, Saga (or Gaga) that deals in tourism for the elderly. A multi millionaire, De Haan owns masses of run down property in central Folkestone and through the Triennial clearly hopes to set the gentrification ball rolling. An Observer newspaper reporter described Folkestone “as once the most glorious holiday destination in all England”, Edward VIII his mistress and an entourage of aristocrats staying in the Metropole and Grand hotels high on the leas overlooking the Channel. Now that the port has been run down in the wake of the opening of the Channel Tunnel and the former hotels converted into apartments for the retired, the town has become “a ghostly place” in search of a new identity. However at the head of Schlieker’s roll call of notables is none other than Marcel Duchamp, who reputedly crossed the Channel to play a game of chess in the town. It is he who has stamped his seal of authority on the Triennial’s “tales of space and time” and there is enough that is ambiguous in Duchamp that leads one to suspect he might nimbly have side stepped the issue of for or against but nonetheless gone along with this property led stab at regeneration - though covering his tracks with an enigmatic silence.

Schlieker is unquestionably streets ahead of Lee Hall “culturally” (though any meaningful dialogue with her is just as much out of the question) and checking out her curriculum vitae we see that, in addition to being a Turner prize judge, she jointly edited an exhibition back in 1992 in the (S)Turpentine Gallery with East London born Henry Bond whose “work is discussed in relationship to the derive as theorized by Guy Debord” (no apologies for not reproducing the blurb). One of Bond’s published Photo Books is called “La Vie Quotidienne”. Now that title rings a bell, even in English!

Schlieker has chosen the sites of the Triennial’s work and they stretch from the Martello Tower “up near the Warren”. Mention that name to any lepidopterist and it will start a ghost for it once teemed with butterflies and moths, though not any more. There are records of Berger’s Clouded Yellow and it formerly hosted a variable colony of Scarlet Tigers, a moth I have yearned to see since childhood, having only ever seen a squashed specimen on a road near the village of Stanton St John in Oxfordshire. In E.B. Fords “Moths” (1955), the Warren is one of just four plates illustrating habitat and I am reminded that, as a youth of twelve or thirteen, I would stare at the black and white photo in my bedroom in temperate Co Durham and dearly wish I could be instantly transported to this alluring, tropical, undercliff. When an artist like Dion, who describes his work as “incorporating aspects of archaeology and ecology”, moves in on a place it invariably means that place is fucked ecologically and historically in terms of grasping its real, rather than local history, and that we had better look elsewhere for a nature that still just about manages to run free and a history that escapes ideology. The contrast is at its most stark between the Yorkshire Sculpture Park (which the Triennial cites as an example of ecologically minded, open space public art) and the nearby Woolley Colliery spoil heap. The latter is in every respect superior, from the Pit Fountains, to the Dingy Skippers, Little Ringed Plovers and rather rare Marsh St John’s Wort, to the submerged iron grids with their coral-like bloom of rust, lapped by the gentle waves that ripple across the pit ponds. The fall in numbers of species inversely parallels the growth in the number of eco artists. (For further elaboration read the first paragraphs of MABEY BABY and/or look at the video of the Dingy Skipper at Woolley colliery elsewhere on this web).

In 2009 the Triennial appears to have bombed, a victim of the crises. I couldn’t help but contrast the reality of a council estate barbecue I attended this summer in Folkestone and the PR put out by a West London agency promoting the Triennial. The art fest was never mentioned but the bats were, the residents of the estate taking a pride in their presence. We had been invited by Andria, a wholesome lass, and the difference between her and Tracy Emin is that between an absurdly rewarded nothing artist who provocatively plays on her sexuality (the only thing she has going for her), whilst pretending otherwise, and a worked to death, white collar secretary, in a road building firm who posts politically incorrect, off message texts of extreme obscenity. Emin was contracted by the Triennial to create an installation, which she duly did and that she entitled “Baby Things”, to call attention to the town`s high rate of teen pregnancy. Andria’s texts are full of cunts, cocks, saggy breasts and limp dicks that give the impression she’s anybody’s. Nothing could be more mistaken, but she is up front in a way Emin can never now be, Emin’s role, if she could ever get though to a person like Andria, to make her ashamed in front of herself, to confuse and disorientate her, give her two faces instead of one and destroy her working class reality. For the Triennial is about buggering-up the perceptions of the ordinary people of Folkestone, to make them other than what they are, to substitute alterity for alienation and to get them to act as the bottom-up drivers of new phase of capitalist reconstruction from which the majority will be excluded, concept art and the valorisation of nature playing an increasingly central role in the makeover and rebranding of traditional townscapes and their hinterlands.

Meandering dirt roads lead eventfully today to the superhighway and so we are back to where we started out: futurology and techno-romanticism. Though the allegedly larger than life and more real than for real, “DisneyNature” films have yet to hit the big screen, an “innovative” example of another type of bankrupt genre has: “Avatar”. This too strives to manufacture a visceral immersive film experience and to turn cinema into “the ultimate immersive experience” as the director James Cameron puts it. Director also of “Terminator 2” and “Titanic”, Cameron sought to create in “Avatar” an unprecedented “illusion of depth” formed from a novel “fusion digital 3D camera system” and the use of motion capture suits, studded with sensors that feed back to a bank of computers. 70% of it is CGI (computer generated imaging), the actors now genuinely byte actors, half digital half human chimaeras on a performance capture stage six times bigger than anything used in Hollywood before. With each day that passes, the film studio becomes more like a wished-for future biolab or protean operating theatre that puts its imaginary nurslings through their first steps.

Though the revived 3D format still requires audiences to wear polarised glasses, Hollywood execs are now talking of moth balling their conventional 2D illusions. And TV has responded with the first 3D sets promised shortly with laser TV somewhat further down the line, and that has the potential to be yet more immersive and like interactive theatre. Billed as the ultimate sitting room entertainment, it is merely the initial stage of a yet more distant possibility that seeks too make entertainment self and advertising also, and that we end as digitised man having become our own software and image producing factory. How will nature film makers respond to these challenges, for they are already half way down the road, digital renditions of microscopic processes now the norm? But this too is merely a beginning. And will Attenborough eventually be seen as a transitional impresario, part new, part old, a mere presenter, finally, but not a “creator”, a hesitant anticipation of the new digital magi to come, for he is, though unawares, most assuredly already pushing hard in that direction?

Attenborough of course would not see/recognise himself in this mirror held up to the future and would find it preposterous. Yet all his life he has gone in fear of saying anything leading and so we must now abruptly shift away from the gruesome birth pangs of techno-romanticism and go hard up against present day reality and scrutinize what Attenborough had to say on the July 2009 Vestas wind farm factory occupation on the Isle of Wight. This will take up no time at all because he had absolutely nothing to say about it-which is, after all, only being true to his Royal Sirness.

Stuart Wise: October/November 2009

The John Clare Collective was more a praxis of hope for the future around wilding adventures / adventurers than having an actual practical existence yet spanned a period of around 18 years just after the Millennium and occurred in the arena around Ruskin's "industrial gorge" in Bradford, West Yorkshire. Our often daily eco interventions in this strange and delightful "landscape of contempt" quickly drew a lot of attention -mostly unwanted from general dumbfuk officialdom not least the "Nature Bureaucracy" who wanted to put an end to our activities along with our graffiti, copious stickers, etc deploying police and even hired thugs.

On the other hand we attracted the attention of a motley crew of misfit locals of both sexes - young and old - white, brown and black - who wished to join in our adventures, people who didn't live by "the rules". The common denominator was they hardly had 'proper' jobs but were brimming with indignation and imagination. In no time we were referring to them as a "collective of John Clare's". Indeed some of our stickers on nearby walls, billboards, etc had already quoted words from John Clare......

We did indeed begin to 'work' together with a number of people who could be termed 'mad' in the best sense of such a characterisation and so like the figure of John Clare in the early years of the 19th century in and around East Anglia at the time of the riots and fire-raising around the anti-enclosure Captain Swing peasant movement. Clare, of course spent time in loony bins, was obsessed with the failure of love, unable to write the correct King's English but spieled-out some amazing stuff and was also remarkably knowledgeable about nature learnt on the hoof and not through books. as he moved from one low profile job to another. This very pared-down description of John Clare probably needs to be placed at the beginning of the three webs. Remember too, that Jimmy Hendrick's reggae refrain "And The Wind Cried Mary" was a line lifted from John Clare.......

As for the people who joined in with us in this amazing gorge were all often amazing misfits, some even living in tents alongside the turbulent Bradford Beck, others from the council housing close-by plus a splendid contingent of English Pakistani male youth ever threatening the council officialdom who tried to stop our re-wilding experiment which considering all the obstacles we had to deal with was remarkably successful. That is until the developers plan really did hit and destruction followed supported by the official 'green' rackets. My twin bro' Stuart was broken by it and he became suicidal and which became a factor in his death on the 28th of October 2021. I only found out a few days ago just how bad this destruction had hit him in a personal diary he kept by his bedside....I now wish I hadn't picked it up in the pile of notebooks I keep which I know I must read more precisely.....

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Nameless Wilding

(An activity where every wild child of whatever age is welcome)

"The outside butterflies are only trying to rejoin the inside butterflies: don't replace, in yourself, a single pane of the street lamp if it should happen to get broken."

(Line from a Surrealist Manifesto)

Fredrich Nietzsche or a Grasshopper on an old pneumatic tyre on the Lanolin site adjacent to the Bradford Beck, Shipley, West Yorks and surely the most insect-rich site in Bradford?

What follows is a brief overview of interventions in landscapes of industrial dereliction that can have revolutionary possibilities providing we more or less clearly embark on a subversive path, a path which any of you out there can immediately take up. For us it's a path we can clandestinely keep permanently altering at the same time remaining respectful of what is there, ever ready to acknowledge we are hardly going to be allowed to continue doing what we would like. We will be stopped at some point or another by some officious organisation or authority figure because we are taking matters into our own hands added to which we are ignoring officially recognised eco organisations which we regard as nigh on useless. Through bitter experience we are now wary of delegating tasks we clearly know we must do ourselves; an ad infinitum of wilding that anybody can engage in if so determined, one which ignores the idiotic niceties of law regarding who owns what. In short, something like an imitation of nature's own wayward behaviour in this regard. What we have outlined in the following pages is an emerging project gatecrashing through original aims. It's a project which developed on the hoof spontaneously, only later becoming aware it had a history involving John Ruskin, stones, geology and especially the old heyday of the Bradford Canal which over-lapped with the stupidities of a proposed official re-vamp courtesy of Will Alsop's neo-Archigram architectural project, itself part and parcel of a free-market oriented, equally stupid mad cap scheme called the Aire Valley Regeneration Plan.

In fact unbeknown to ourselves for years we had been treading the route of the former Bradford Canal in Shipley instantly realizing where it had not been tarmaced were potential dream sites for the Common Blue and other butterflies. It was only when consulting maps in the library that we became conscious the fairy steps we had taken from the Leeds Road to the Valley Road Bridge near enough to the city centre followed the route of the former canal. Reading up on the canal, we quickly became fully aware that the recently proposed 3rd opening was going to be the centre piece of a resurgent Bradford, this ill conceived and matchless folly an example of civic hubris that is truly breathtaking in its consequences. And yet such is the scale of this disaster, it is becoming a defining image of the future, a hollowed-out city centre that can only be reclaimed by nature. What happens to Bradford once the impossible illusion of retail regeneration is finally laid to rest is of relevance to every other major city in the developed or 'developing' world.

Are their parallels? Obviously, the example of Detroit, Michigan immediately comes to mind especially the city's natural 'greening' recolonisation by nature augmented by a large amount of 'gardening' which has taken place in and among its former huge factory belt but there differences end. Bradford so far has not been plagued by a vicious youth gang culture and, if anything its fuckhead episode in the early noughties was brief indeed unable to sustain the illusions inherent in a territorial wildcard street capitalisation based on the sale of hard drugs bolstered by gangsta rap; a culture we rapidly came into heavy conflict with especially the homophobia. We weren't the only ones as others, particularly working class women of all races – whilst not forgetting the contribution of Sikh males – determinedly took spontaneously organised collective action to stop this feral brutality. Nowadays most of the former adherents of this deadly culture have been forced into poorly paid casual work and / or – often at one and the same time - becoming relatively enlightened alternatives some of whom we are matey with. On the other hand it must not be forgotten that a pared down inter-gang violence throughout South and West Yorkshire over the spoils of drugs money is as nasty as ever.

As for Detroit it is now an urban prairie beset with calamitous breakdown amidst burgeoning oases of subsistence allotment agriculture, which, in itself seems to be well managed and often locally collectivised. Although this often-excellent experiment is about basic survival it also can be a food for free project and has been described as a "neighbourhood level, leftist utopianism" finding its place within the umbrella of the Occupy movement in autumn 2011. Furthermore, due to a catastrophic collapse in property prices, city-living in central Detroit is cheaper than a lot of places in America attracting a marginalized population of artistically inclined folk who aesthetically valorise this fascinating collapse picking out visual memorabilia which end up in coffee table books or art exhibitions for the passive intellectual consumer. It could be characterised as a form of neo-psychogeographical decay chic which one local Afro-American old timer bitterly described as "Detroit's abstract art project." Indeed the city administration of Detroit not so long ago appointed a Minister of Tourism who organises official sight seeing trips covering both urban farmers / community gardeners and the 'ruin' installation art though mostly catering for the latter day media-hyped neo-bohemian paradise at the heart of it. Once a few decades ago this artistic cum alternative colonisation was a prelude to wholesale regeneration accompanied by a boom in property prices. Before the great banking crash of 2008, Detroit had in fact got in on this very act and tried to reinvent Motown as the new capital of artistic innovation dabbling in cultural bubble economics. This experiment came to nought and nowadays by enlarge that's the last prospect on offer so where is this latest cultural colonisation now going? At best surfaces have been prettied up making up a vast DIY canvas but to what point as it seems there are no slogans indicating anything like a coherent exit from the horror of deepening capitalist exploitation. It's not only glamorised for those in the know like in the films of ex-punk Julian Temple but by hundreds of on location photographers who hone in on 8 lane byways empty of cars, houses that look like quirky Buster Keaton cum Salvador Dali stage sets etc (e.g. the giant melted clock face on top of the 18 story Beaux Arts-like Michigan Central rail station which has been closed for over twenty years.) And that's about it as far as any in depth analysis goes. On the surface this valorisation may seem probing, creative stuff but we also know these spaces have become jam-packed with an often drug-fuelled psychotic menace and the last thing we want to do is encourage a dog eats dog wilding praxis far removed from the overthrow of the social relations of capitalist reproduction. More practically decomposition like this does not necessarily imply the chaotic beginnings of a future revolutionary peoples' council throughout Detroit arising phoenix-like from the ashes of hipster ruins, as equally this collapse could imply the end of everything that makes life worth living. We must always keep in mind Rimbaud's prophetic exhortation: "Decomposition must be swept aside but the clock has not yet struck the hour of pure pain"... and hopefully never will.

But could this scenario throughout the coming years be applied to Bradford? Well, most certainly it could as after all there is now a large, alternative population embed throughout the city, attracted from all over the UK by the cheap living and the largely welcoming, often libertarian, naive anti-capitalist, un-racist responses of many of its inner-city inhabitants well sympathetic to any kind of loosened-up life-style. And as for the artistic, spatial afterglow well maybe that phase is still in its infancy though more about that later.......

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The former Bradford Canal is lodged in the city's unconscious. Like a fatal trauma, the memory of it won't go away and every so often unbalances the entire city. It is the most infamous canal in all history, this industrial Styx periodically bursting into flames, like it was flowing straight from hell. Its waters were black, the headwaters that lapped the cathedral reminding John Ruskin of the contents of a spilled ink horn. Opened in 1774, the £20,000 required for its construction had been put up by local coal owners. It was soon transporting not only coal but also quarried stone and bringing in iron ore, which was then carted along rails by horses to Low Moor iron works.

It was to this boom city that Ruskin was literally drawn. It was on this city; Ruskin focused his welfare plans and energies. Venice was the theory, Bradford the practice. Enough of The Stones of Venice. Whereas Venice was preserved in aspic, here was a city in the making, a malleable city. Why chose Bradford and not Manchester as Disraeli did for the setting of his 'Chartist' novel, Sybil – or The Two Nations, for he also had a message to deliver? Founded on stone and surrounded by rock escarpments, it was Bradford's geological location that also fascinated Ruskin. Sitting on a bog on an alluvial plain, Manchester had comparatively little to offer to the geologist and naturalist. Fresh from Venice, he instead notes the quality of the stone which he considers more beautiful to that quarried around Halifax. He notes the lime slack from the furnaces covering Manningham Lane, then the world's richest thoroughfare, when it should have been paved with stone. He writes of sooty chickens and other farm animals covered in industrial grime, the moors never that far away. He compares the veins of hematite in the iron ore heaped in the canal barges to that of haemoglobin. (For further insights read Comments on Indian & York stone. Slave labour, aesthetic life style, quarrying and butterflies on the Dialectical Butterflies web1 ).

And yet where are the textile workers and woollen industry in Ruskin's vivid descriptions of Bradford? They are hardly mentioned and only silence reigns regarding such fine examples as the armed 'physical force' Chartism centred in the Horton districts which pre-figured Ruskin by a mere few years. It's as though Ruskin didn't want to acknowledge them personally most likely unnerved by their insurrectionary demeanour and self-reliance as those at the sharp end were there to be helped not encouraged in wilfulness. True to type in 1871 Ruskin refused to support the Paris Commune though in defeat he recommended generous assistance to persecuted communards because those who worked with their hand, shabby and poverty stricken were meant to more or less passively follow Ruskin's supremely knowledgeable, benevolent but autocratic leadership. No wonder George Bernard Shaw aptly described him as "a High Tory Bolshevik".... And yet and yet Ruskin was immensely proud that skilled tradesmen from Bingley's Mechanic's Institute right next to Bradford, prominent among which were stonemasons, thrilled to his words. Delighted though he was that these people read his writings, he then couldn't respond bending his haughty manner to engage in collective, spontaneous dialogue. For certain if he had, his knowledge of stones – and perhaps nature (and workers) in general – might have taken a dialectical, profound leap. A contemporary of Ruskin and with equal knowledge of northern England, Fred Engels could talk to workers in a more egalitarian and enquiring way whilst lacking that eco disposition that was clearly in embryonic form within Ruskin writings. (In parentheses, it seems too that Marx visited Bradford in the company of Engels and the then almost permanent riot area of Silsbridge Lane is actually mentioned in Capital. Alas a post-modernist Bradford council ridding itself of eyesores knocked the Lane down a few years ago. A sad, sad day.)

Thus Ruskin would have been well aware that stony ground cannot soak up rain and a thunderstorm could spell disaster for Bradford. Seduced too much by the promise of industry preparing the ground for a classless, utopian society, Engels could not have foreseen this in his Condition of the Working Class in England, 1844. And when the floods came many people would die in that other stretch of running water, the equally infamous Bradford Beck's raging waters, made worse because of the force of the water. Constricted by the stone foundations of factories and houses built along the beck's course, the might of the storm surge was vastly increased. As Ruskin journeys into Bradford from Bolton Abbey in traditionally rich and scenic Wharfedale, a suitably religious starting point, an epic scene unfolds before his eyes. This is Genesis and Dante's Inferno combined, though both are given an allegorical rather than literal treatment. It is the extractive industries that have unleashed this hell, the rich industrialists blinded by their addiction to money, their eyes put out by the gods of the underworld who own the precious materials the earth contains and who are not to be mocked.

Examining the course of the River Aire Ruskin sees it must have broken through a glacial moraine, his knowledge of the still infant subject of geology that good. Above all it is a city in which welfare principles can be realized, a place in which stone and all that it implies can become consequent once more, craft and nature raised to a new unity. And as for iron ore, it is its unwrought aesthetic quality that must be shown to matter. At times Ruskin can sweep aside craft skills in favour of the raw beauty of nature that has no need of further adornment. Once a builder learns this they can then begin to truly build, that being the most profound lesson to be gained from his highly influential "nature of Gothic". Rather than a return to the select craft traditions that created the Gothic cathedrals, it heralds more an artless form of free assembly, open to everyone. But then Ruskin was devastated finding the neo-gothic Wool Exchange that now houses Waterstone's, pubs and coffee shops, a nonsense. Unlike Hegel who equally appreciated the glories of original Gothic, Ruskin believed that the period could again be conjured up almost out of thin air if there was sufficient determination to do so having no grasp of the totality of real historical movement and the rise and fall of artistic form, a motion that Hegel grasped so beautifully. Essentially Ruskin was fated to dupe himself; a duping that helped cost him his sanity.

In fact the motives behind the construction of the Bradford Canal were strictly utilitarian and solely geared to profit. Just short of 100 years later, it was for Ruskin a three-mile journey that led straight to the inner most regions of hell, utility having become demonic. And yet Ruskin rather than describing Bradford as an inferno of smoke on the contrary surprisingly refers to it as a "paradise of smoke". There is something almost Symbolist in his dissolving of contours, like smog was a visionary wormhole onto the future, allowing us to reconstruct the world according to our inmost desires, the wreathing smoke creating our personal castles in the air, an insubstantial blue print of what might be. The French anti-poet Mallarme sometime later would say much the same about the London fogs, as if smoke was the perfect material equivalent of the dialectic of being and nothing. These pea soupers were a step on from Mallarme's blank page of pure space that proclaimed the end of poetry and that also signified an unprecedented leap into the unknown, the reformism of fog promising a much more fundamental revolution.

In the last half of the 19th century the uproar grew so loud that there was no alternative but to close this chemical cocktail of a canal only for it to be reopened in 1872 once pumping stations had been installed, the Bowling Beck descending from another side of Bradford's seven hills unable to replenish the canal's foul waters, as was originally hoped. Though it would carry more traffic than ever in the first two decades of the 20th century, the canal would finally close in 1926. Though filled in, it slumbered on like a crime awaiting redemption a particularly notorious example of the paleo-industrial past, a past that held out the possibility of 'recovery' by being born again as sanitized history and becoming a post modern, open air museum aesthetic of retail, commercial and residential property values. In the form of the Aire Valley Regeneration Plan, the 3rd opening of the Bradford Canal would mark its historical expiation. Only this time the canal's renewed lease of life was not immediately utilitarian but aesthetico/natural (leisure boats in a sylvan setting rather than industrial barges would ply its length), the locks to be replaced by sculpted water features, which nevertheless still had to somehow function as locks! The plan needed to be rubber stamped and there is no better way of doing this than through so-called "public consultation" which means only trifling details are open to question, not a plan's fundamentals.

Smoke and mirrors, bubble economics drove this affirmative 'blue sky' thinking, (one that bears an uncanny, upside-down resemblance to the smoke apparitions of Ruskin and Mallarme), the madness of easy credit giving away to the equal and opposite madness of austerity, austerians believing, with almost religious fervour, that after a long period of penance they will one day have their bubble back and Bradford's Westfield's will eventually resume building their monstrosity of a shopping mall where the far more exciting 'big hole' remains on show. The money was never there in the first place ("front-loaded") and each stage was monetarily dependent on the successful completion of the previous one. This faith school of economic thought preached that boom and bust was at an end and that everything was now possible, the will to dream dreams ("brain storming") receiving official blessing.

However there is literally no question that our 'vision' of a constantly reinvigorated conservation corridor is so much more grounded than the original Aire Valley Scheme and that if it was seriously taken up by a 'citizens army' could become a beacon of hope, signposting the way to a genuine greening of cities and a future landscape where the law of value, wage labour, commodity production and the state will be abolished through social revolution. The ecological part of the original scheme was mere greenwash, a finance based commodification of nature underpinning deluxe retailing and a booming property sector, the headwaters of the reopened canal, the corridor's prime location. Instead, in its place, we have a new entrance to hell and how much Ruskin may well have squirmed to learn that, in part, the nature he saw all around him in Bradford and struggling to make its presence felt, even violently in the case of the beck, had been taken up and turned against this anti industrial rentier who never got his hands dirty, the importance of the rentier sector increasing with the pace of deindustrialization. When he visited Bradford, Brown and Muffs, the city's earlier premier apartment store was nearing completion, opening in 1870. The new retailing opportunities of the 3rd millennium were meant to put the city's retailing past to shame. Instead Poundland, BetFred and Bingo threaten to overwhelm it. Even though that inspiring graffiti "Best Among Ruins" above the 'big hole' has been effaced there is a growing chorus of voices clamouring to be heard announcing the death of the city, article after article in the local T & A newspaper proclaiming the end of 'the high street' in one form or another (the irresistible growth of internet shopping, for example). The irony of the Aire Valley Regeneration Scheme is to fast-forward Bradford's demise. A city centre constructed around niche shopping and entertainment will forever remain a fantasy. But it will take time for the realization to sink in. But sink in it most assuredly will.

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For some time rather naively, and on the nod as it were, then unaware of what was really at stake, well over 12 years ago we had suggested planting birds foot trefoil along the canal's reaches to bring the Common Blue butterfly back into the city centre. The original colony had been destroyed by the construction of the Forster Square Retail Park in the mid 1990s, even though amongst the chattering classes of the state and the business community, maintaining biodiversity was then becoming all the rage. (See the Blue Female of the Common Blue In West Yorks) It was though an idea that was also morphing into almost something else entirely, a counter-power to so-called regeneration through wilding a failed city through the supercession of old time smoke stack industry plus the more contemporary retailing city - suggesting a new relationship with nature but one also based on forgotten vernacular ways minus traditional, closed down mind-sets. So no Methodism or any other kind of religion here! But then we upped the ante and some of the more recent background can be gleaned from reading 2012: Creating the Common Blue on The Commons of Industrial and Urban Dereliction on both the Dialectical Butterflies and Revolt Against Plenty webs, a post obviously clearly affected by the on-going Occupy movement then sweeping through the world throughout 1911 as emphasis was placed on the people who clandestinely rummage through these places, some secretly living there especially immigrants. By then, allying ourselves with unknown allies and protagonists we wanted to liberate areas that within these last 12 years had become heavily fenced-in as warehousing development etc. gave way to zombie land banking covered with buddleia and melilot.

We quickly became aware we were confronting diverse forces brought into play in this open but also hide and seek permanent contestation. These forces were all intermingling and there were no clear boundaries between immigrants, fly tippers, the local installation crew, the dog walkers, the misfits, the suicidal wanderers, the security outfits, the community police, the sub contracted clean-up gangs, the council suits and ubiquitous Health & Safety. And hovering around in the background of all this – and supposedly on our side - the reactionary but manipulative role of the official eco bodies, our contestation inspired also by the amazing example of William Bunting and his Beavers on the Humber Levels around Thorne Colliery in the 1970s, which even though dissimilar in scope, tactics and even theory was galvanic. His contestation was Spanish anarchist in lineage ours more Situationist / Encyclopedia de Nuisances inclined, even though the example of Bunting remains on our minds as we are also still trying to put together the first authentic account of the Beavers. Moreover the two projects were tending to interweave...

In his teens William Bunting was an inspired non-mercenary libertarian gunrunner for the anarchist militias during the Spanish Revolution of 1936-8. The guy couldn't forget this experience, which burnt into his soul, and a few decades later in the early 1970s his eco escapades became something of a reincarnation of his youth perhaps imagining himself as a latter day eco-Durrutti with hunting gun, rifle and sabre strapped to his waist belt forcing predatory ranchers and multinational fertilizer businesses alike to lay off colonising these Wastes. In order to prevent further environmental depredation and enclosure Bunting would occasionally deploy dynamite purloined from the local collieries expropriated by rebellious wildcat miners who were among his most ardent followers. Blowing up illegally filled-in dikes he pushed the multinationals and ranchers back into their stinking holes leaving behind many curt but poetic visiting cards reminiscent of the style of English football hooligans. These escapades would periodically land Bunting in jail for short stretches but the guy simply wouldn't give up until illness and old age finally took their toll. Having died sometime ago his often burly, fervent supporters still stalk these Wastes like ever-present Ancient Mariners with tales as riveting as the fabled rime Coleridge originally put together. Notably, one guy whom we are friendly with recalls that Bunting deployed a "fuck" and a "cunt" in just about every sentence, so obviously PC language had made no inroads here! If this true-life story had been put together 15 ago it's the type of document that Editions Encyclopedie de Nuisances would possibly have gladly published.

So in that sense there's an overlap with our efforts but then like a bolt from the blue a model from the past also suggested itself in the form of the situationist proposed exhibit of 1959 in Amsterdam's Stedlelijk art gallery one which never could be realised in such a fake arena. This possibly intended failure resulted in something much better - a pointed critique of recuperation directed against cutorial space – having clearly demonstrated how impossible it was to squeeze a real urban labyrinth within an art gallery's walls. It simply couldn't be done and the protagonists finally declared that any future labyrinth would have to be constructed on waste ground "in direct function with urban realities." By default too, it also demonstrated that you need to do something NOW with your hands, something creative that moves out over as against prevailing passivity, to make something which hasn't anything to do with mass consumer artistic leftovers and art galleries, Turner Prize installations or the latest gimmick from Antony Gormley. To which we need to add, that also counters the physical reduction of our hands and fingers from being nothing more than instruments pressing endless remotes. Recognition too that it's impossible to build anything that's authentic in this simulacrum of real society meaning we can do nothing more than make tentative first steps beyond trying to increase bio-diversity, things like lean too's, children's dens, hides, perhaps everything hidden in undergrowth and post industrial dense carr woodland. Anything beyond that will become nothing more than ubiquitous faux conservation, the icing on the cake of a totally alienated urbanism. This dilemma of course, the eco-campers well know though none know well, not having sufficiently theorised the ramifications of this conundrum.

Almost inevitably what has become a 300-acre or more project dispersed across Bradford (though major tentacles reach as far as Woolley and Dinnington colliery spoil heaps) implies a fundamental critique of architecture and building in its entirety. We must condemn all urbanism in the sense of the old German SDS formulation from the late 1960s: "Stop all buildings. All buildings are beautiful" a position a post Icteric milieu in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne also proclaimed. Essentially we initially and rightly interpreted this declaration as an attack on growing urban aestheticisation and concomitant life style, a poignant subversive response that was quickly cut short as reaction and an even greater aestheticism reached crescendo decades later. This long and horrible moment also implied its dialectical opposite, the end of the domination of the visual, implying in the crudest sense of the term, a vast trouncing of aesthetics maybe about to erupt. What we really demand first and foremost is the total transformation of the human subject through a revolutionary uprising that will immeasurably enrich all human potential, a raging flood, a momentum sloughing off the reign of aesthetics inseparable from the present reign of fictive capital. It is no longer a matter of building. Rather a time is fast approaching when the capitalist mode of production in its entirety – and not just fictitious capital - will no longer be able to successfully valorise itself as it comes up starkly against its internal limitations presenting us with the final choice between barbarism and total social revolution. A vast debt overhang is merely the obvious fact pointing towards this terminal crisis.

In the context of reading about the history of industrial Bradford after all the aesthetic peregrinations of Ruskin's hopes for a revived, all-embracing Gothic culture we stumbled across the "rubble houses" where the delvers lived which it seems surrounded the giant stone quarries of Wapping and elsewhere on the fringes of the city centre. Preferring the traditional pleasantries of old Yorkshire vernacular stone dwellings Ruskin makes no mention and even today the Bradford Antiquarian Society remains silent possessing no drawings of these tantalising "rubble houses" – most likely because they defy definition as possible human dwellings. Yet this is what tantalises not because we desire some repeat as, after all, hygiene here was non-existent but because they suggest something beyond the aesthetic gaze.....

Moreover we can no longer build for ourselves because subversive counter-architectural history has also been colonised and the child-like beauty of objects like Cheval's Fairy Palace or Simon Rodia's Watts Towers have been turned into rampant commodified niche specialisms promoted by aesthetic entrepreneurs, Nay more, en route to centre stage as increasingly these efforts are part of the backdrop of TV programmes like architect [what else?] George Clarke's Amazing Spaces or left wing installation artists like Grayson Perry. The latter's so called Gingerbread House created in tandem with a hip architects collective set in an area of "outstanding natural beauty" near Harwich in Essex will be rented out for cultural holiday jaunts making banal nonsense of the postman's Cheval's transcendental efforts – as Cheval said "let the dream begin" – a dream outside any architectural realm having no commercial value whatsoever for the maker. Yet there are many other examples everywhere and all have some quality. Over the last twenty years or so, an amazing grotto part of which is studded with four and a half million seashells was discovered beneath Margate's limestone cliffs. No one has a clue what it once stood for or when it was made possibly centuries ago. Inevitably it has been fronted by a grotto café and has become a means of making dosh attracting culture tourists bored with the typical seaside excursion itinerary. In this age of ultimate commercial banalisation we can expect no other. However, our approach couldn't be more different; anti aesthetic, anti property, anti commercial, anti the law of value, anti commodification though pro the riches inherent in collective / individual liberated human potential. It's guerrilla in the broadest sense of the term having nothing to do with ownership, money or grants from benevolent bodies.

Neither can it be said we have anything in common with those egotistical figures ensconced within the art world that have the arrogance to remake vast areas of industrial dereliction as a form of cute, aesthetic display. The example of former architectural critic turned pharonic installation merchant name of Charles Jencks comes to mind especially his recent Ashington Colliery site in Northumberland doubling from the air as a giant nude woman lying on a couch or bed. Done in collaboration with the usual slew of aestheticised brutalised landscape designers boosted by colossal grants and subsidies it will in practise be no different from the ghastly colliery makeovers we panned a number of years ago which showed nothing but contempt for local bio-diversity resulting especially in a holocaust of the threatened Dingy Skipper butterfly. You can bet your life the Dingy Skipper would have flourished at Ashington and it won't be their now gassed-out with a covering of spectacular fluorescent rye grass or, something similar. Nor can we have any truck with Ian Hamilton Findlay's outdoors concrete poetry display at Stonypath in the wilds of the Pentland Hills in the Southern Uplands of Scotland which is nothing more than a sculptural project sub-contracted out to various trades' people as gallery product in plein aire situations. Though set within nature its eco content is virtually nil and cannot be regarded as a beacon pointing to valid future eco-experimentation.

Above: Computer mock-up of Grayson Perry's proposed house designed in collaboration with neo-philosopher, Alain de Botton. Described by Perry as "a house-shrine" full of artefacts, the hotel (for that is what it is) will be "encrusted with sculptures, ceramics and tapestries" put together around a fictional woman named Julie whose life history gradually unfolds as the tourist tenant coughs up the B & B fulfilling the banal requirements of the usual "holiday experience of a lifetime". One local objecting to the development aptly said it was "pseudo-subversive neo-kitsch." Yes, critique really seems to be improving! Below: The by now well known chic-style hobbit houses springing up all over often (like these) gracing National Trust land for how else could they get permission to build? Undoubtedly better than Perry's celebrity-like ostentation, more humdrum and genuine and often lived in by poor people though one may well ask, how subversive is the perspective of those who live in them? Have not the inhabitants chosen this existence because Tolkien / Harry Potter oriented and could you have a well-oiled crazy night in the pub with them plumbing the depths of the totality of alienations?

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Yet it's this trajectory that unnerves us. Despite the periodic, sometimes unbridled attacks by various goons on minimum wages employed by various institutions we have experienced whilst engaging in eco interventions, we recognise that recuperation will easily be our main enemy. We have done all we can by ourselves alone but the project will most likely be taken out of our hands as the eco-versity has begun to take a keen interest and professional passive eco on-lookers increasingly smile with delight. From now on we will also have to confront the many-sided facets of recuperation. It is not a simple task. There's now a huge slew of post artistic 'art' which has survived the welcome death of post modernist vacuities touted by Baudrillard, Derrida, Lyotard, Deleuze etc. Foremost in this process (see The London Olympics and Mass Market Neo-Psychogeography ) is the valorisation of industrial dereliction as passive aesthetic achievement (i.e. untouched by artistic hands but signified as such by Duchampian appropriation). You roughly know who these culprits are as we've regularly mentioned them and the common denominator underlying them all is passivity. They aren't going to cut up untidy. Thus the Wilson Twins from Newcastle dwell on the evil contamination surrounding Chernobyl's nuclear reactor meltdown and the lesser evil implicit in the ex-MOD vistas surrounding Orford Ness in Suffolk. Obviously, like us, the Wilson Twins are fascinated by the strange topography of these tormented places no doubt delighting in the disused morphing strange shapes that are to be found on these post industrial, post military landscapes. But would they try and do anything subversive on these fascinating terrains? You bet they wouldn't as their main interest revolves around cosying up to the cultural establishment and the only intervention to be countenanced is one based on aesthetic ornamentation; installing amplified, ambient sound throughout abandoned military buildings or mounting film exhibits via rooms-within-rooms in art galleries. It amounts to sweet FA. This is not revolutionary critique but further examples of anodyne culturisms. Finally in passing we post a warning: if any neo-artist out for media glory in future tries to valorise the Bradford experiment we will personally wreck their exhibits. That's a promise.

As opposed to this passive neo-artistic milieu, our contemporary engaged ecologists somewhat actively deployed in habitat creation or management, in practise mismanage, as they are insensitive to the wonders of post-industrial landscape ignoring frequently its often-bizarre rapid natural recapture. They wish to clear away all these 'eyesores' like burnt out cars dumped in a river, haphazard strewn heaps of abandoned tyres, bricks, concrete and rotting ply board etc. With a retarded blinkered vision that has yet to encounter the neo-psychogeographers industrial Duchampian appropriations, these ecos' fail to see that post industrial habitat often facilitates a renewed bio-diversity and the burnt out car within ten year's becomes an odd river island quickly stacked up with silt which various plants, insects and birds enthusiastically take to (see photos below). These ecos' taste for real landscape is therefore invariably abominable, traditionally scenic oriented and totally at odds with our interventions which are based on respect for givens we've inherited from the smoke stack era of the industrial revolution.

Above: A stolen car, set on fire and driven topsy-turvy over the steep hillside of the Bradford Beck in Shipley in the early noughties has now become a wild life haven through which is growing jack-by-the- hedge. Orange Tips often alight here in spring.

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In our 'mad' eco project in Shipley there are forces all unknown to each other yet each creatively (more or less) reacting to the others. We have essentially set these forces in motion.

1. The fly-tipper.
2. Those who would put to further use what the fly-tipper had left.
3. The vandals and the shifting boundaries between them and the art 'vandals', their youthful naiveté mounting informal installations.
4. The council officials who are perplexed by what's going on and don't know how to put a stop to it, their efforts to enforce the law becoming a kind of installation – in the absence of barbed wire, chucked cabling will have to do, moreover they have no money allocated to do anything else than improvise with the things dumped around them. In a way they are persecuted stupid suits with few resources. But who is going to take notice of them or their feeble counter insurgency? Only the really conditioned middle classes who don't go here in any case. As for the rest, rather it is treated as a further invitation to participate, to add to the wonderment of this enchanted carr woodland that bears a strange resemblance to a Claude Lorraine.

Sometimes sitting among this gloriously changing rubbish dump you can get the sensation of arm-lengths possession and is this good or bad? That our clandestine activities were (are) bearing fruit and that we actually were (are) changing (making) a landscape (not painting it as a Claude or a Corot would have done and in any case, historically the times are too late for that). One day in the summer of 2012, this impression was enhanced by two girls playing beside the filthy, often turpentine coloured beck – accompanied by the sounds of their laughter. When we crossed the wooden bridge we saw they had pulled down a couple of concrete slabs which had once formed the approach to a previous bridge probably washed away in the ferocious torrents that suddenly seem to appear from nowhere as a cloud bursts over some Pennine promontory nearby. But these gals were also taking hold of this abandoned, morphing cityscape of huge potential.

We begin to claim these dumps for others and the contours began to emerge. Where Claude painted we landscape, not the evocative somewhat mysterious painted dream but its potential realisation. For this covered in industrial canal which John Ruskin unintentionally lyricised is like a grand avenue framing industrial dereliction and rubbish, a dream in perspective especially when the sun is setting and the rays turn golden gilding the tree tops. We began connecting up the different parts – the three parts – of the site. The aim is to create an industrial meadowland.

Above: shadows, invocations, displacements of a post-industrial Corot and Claude?

We opened up the area with saws, snips and shears now others are making their own contribution. The environment has been dynamised because of our innovation. We are the hidden facilitators. People are using the site more. The point is to encourage their involvement – to elicit it – without them realising. So they think it comes from them. It is the opposite of being ordered, told, commanded – the opposite of rules, of byelaws, of the constrictions of nature reserves. It is essentially lawless, a dream landscape in which each is king and queen. Absolute.

No one really knows who is doing this big change and we have a lot to be paranoid about which is why we are the ghosts of encounter. We don't want to be known, to be interviewed by the press, to be on TV. We want to continue as before, a secret, shaping force, devil gardeners that flit in and out of existence that cannot be pinned down, a dramatic, elemental force that cannot be stopped because nobody knows who we are. Once we lose our anonymity we lose our power to mould landscape and bring out the best in our unknown compatriots encouraging them to do the same. It is like we are the anonymous 'disappeared' gardeners, an invisible force of nature.

We are essentially explorers, discoverers. Never has industrial dereliction been so attractive: the problem is it is also the fertile ground of a bad literary romanticism. The problem is deep topographers have the drop on conservationists. Deep topographers know little or nothing about nature and conservationists have no idea just how much they are in thrall to a banal countryside aesthetic. Indeed a meeting up of topographers and conservationists could be of some value in helping change entrenched attitudes. Both though have a long way to go before arriving at revolutionary perspectives.

This is a collage of nature but yet serves nature better than if left to itself. 'Wilding' is better than nature, like the need to clear the basin floor of nettles and some thistles in order to create a trefoil meadow. All this takes time and patience, it is anything but instantaneous and yet it constantly surprises.

Even sometime ago in the summer of 2011 we quickly noticed paint had been poured over a corner of the concrete blocks blocking these informal, industrial roads near where the Bradford Canal went onto the Leeds Road; an obvious bit of Windhill Estate (situated above the site) installation by an utter naïve who left his signature in the paint. So this is where the art school went? We took a photo with a spindly birds foot trefoil plant sunk into the concrete top. Will it ever flower? And will the roots ever bind to the concrete? Further down the tarmaced road covering the former Bradford Canal someone had dumped a load of leylandia. The sawn logs had been piled up almost deliberately as if this was a gesture of eco fly tipping. A hidden vanguard, we had set something in motion. This is now becoming a peoples' transformation of landscape with others sensing this is an attempt to lay hold of waste ground and to collectively develop it according to individual inclination.

In the late summer of 2012, as we walked the length of the left hand side of the strip of land by the railway that is Valley Rd we noticed a spectral tree trunk in the distance. Was it an effect of light? As we got near it, we realised someone had sprayed it with silver paint. Artists have followed our intervention as in Shipley though also paralleled by authority for there were deep tyre tracks running the length of this part of the site. Had we also attracted the attention of Network Rail just as we had the council on the garage site? In this three cornered dance not one 'performer' is entirely sure of the motives of the other two, or there reasons for being there. The 'artist' who had spray painted the still living stump silver would not have noticed the wild strawberry plants surrounding it – and therefore sussed that the reason we lopped the goat willow – in order to expose the small strawberry plants to sunlight. We then noticed on Valley Road someone had sprayed up in silver paint "Wake Up Sheeple" about a quarter of a mile away a stump of goat willow had been sprayed with the same paint. Are we being shadowed? These are artistic leftovers drifting into genuine contestation.

And then something very strange happened at Woolley Colliery which we noticed in October 2012, in our path lay a strange installation on the way back from the spoil heap to Darton Stn. Someone had sprayed fly-agaric mushrooms plus the bowl of a birch tree with silver paint just like someone had done with the stump of a goat willow on the Valley Rd site in Bradford. Basically both 'interventions' were indistinguishable in style. Is it the same person? Again, are we being shadowed? Or rather than 'Pitman Painters' were these examples evidence of an epidemic of 'Post Pitmen Conceptualists'? Or was installation ceasing to be a conscious 'artistic' act and becoming a more random activity? A sort of posting of meaningless signs; signs posting a gathering madness, which will never end up on a gallery wall even as a photograph. And yet we were both sure this 'still life' had been photographed. Is it the fashion for edgelands that attracts? Or is this the direction tags and pieces are now taking, something which is local and not done by art students from Sheffield and Leeds? Something with greater promise?

But where did installation and drift begin an end? Things are becoming interestingly confused, open-ended and possibly at times offering great potential, even elsewhere. The storms of 2012 produced artless events like as though climate change was willy-nilly also taking the trend up and via the elemental fury involved in climate change the Bradford Beck destroyed the containing wall holding in the raging waters bursting through near where it flows into the River Aire. The garage site was instantly flooded and the wood or rather the spinney on the approach to the garage site from the bridge was standing in water like a temperate mangrove swamp, or a miniature Florida everglade, a morphing environmental frighteningly innovative feature of climate change. Once the waters had subsided each trunk was like an installation sculpture. A matrix of twigs and branches of right angles to the perpendicular trunk had collected around the base. Stuck to this matrix like it was a notice board were bits of plastic, lino, PVC, empty goody bags, their saturated industrial colours gleaming like jewels in the gloom – crisp packets, chocolate wrappers, glossy cartoons reading "sesame sticks". Yes, it did look like a theatrical backdrop or an exhibit of rubbish for fools – yet inevitably more sobering, horrible, fascinating because it was so over-poweringly real – no price, unnoticed, no foot prints in the damp earth not even those of a fox – and we were the first to set foot in this post floodplain, the first inhabitants of an altered world.

Above: from temperate everglade swamp to rubbish installation

It also seemed like an "occupation", like this matrix of flotsam and jetsam had been an attempt to improvise walls of sticks, mud, bits of plastic, anything – a reinvention of the wall. Someone had attempted, not that long ago, to construct a yurt in the carr woodland, stringing abandoned electric cable from tree to tree, bending the saplings to serve as ribs over which others, deploying scrounged material, would be thrown. Now the sheer force of the water had done the same, saplings bent over in an arc, their tips touching the ground held down by this detritus of a different soil – torn off branches, rocks, bricks etc. that had been carried along by a mighty surge. Nature's fury had become the final constructor, the ultimate 'recuperation' of a failed revolution against which no redress is possible.

The same went for authority. The path through the wood which we had made one frenzied afternoon leading to the garage was within a couple of weeks or so, quickly 'roped' or rather sellotaped off. At first we thought it might be the council or the garage owner doing it but on reflection was it a form of 'arty' installation that has its origins in Terry Atkinson (that faux enfant terrible lecturer from Leeds Art School who tepidly dipped into aspects of situationist praxis) coming to Bradford?

Above: sellotaped passage and an adjacent spare outline of a yurt

Post the big flood of 2012 and we cut across through the carr woodland of the Lanolin site alongside the Bradford Beck as not only was this amazing topography but what a place to observe the teeming song bird occupation. It wasn't approved of and some shadowy power quickly tried to hinder our endeavours. But where before branches and thinnish tree trunks we had cut down had been dragged from the undergrowth and placed across the impromptu path, now car fenders were used as obstacles as we looked down into the raging waters! The stakes were being upped. The obstacles had been mechanised and obviously brought in. We initially thought it was an installation as so bizarre; a secret security happening not meant to be looked at, almost an artistic negation. The council dump must have been ransacked for suitable material and what more suitable than car fenders!!! They seemed to sum up the madness of the age, a madness beyond redemption exceeding that of all other ages. This unconscious metaphor seemed to be saying do what you will; the car will triumph over the wilding of cities.

Moreover we began to turn installation against authority especially when doing things in sensitive areas where we really could get into deep trouble. For instance we dug up for seeding purposes both sides of a culvert containing signalling cable which Network Rail is hot on because of theft. It was very visible work and certainly the most visible alterations we have ever carried out around Shipley station. We provoked things further by piling up stones and slabs into a bogus installation deliberately to attract attention. If it goes unnoticed it will tell us much, namely that there has been a considerable decrease in surveillance due to lay-offs. Or perhaps if noticed, station staff will be afraid to do anything about it because it looks artistic but also eco and the station staff do not want to be accused of philistinism and, more importantly, wasting Network Rail's money by drawing attention to it, especially as the latter's finances are deeply in the red!

From a pile of stones (which will provide essential basking habitat for insects) it became 'installation' when one of us stuck a shattered piece of rusting drain pipe in it and then adding to it by piling a regular grid of oblong block of concrete on the pile. Meanwhile finding an abandoned bike saddle which Duchampian-like was then deliberately stuck in the ground (never thankfully to get into an art gallery) and the rest of the bike looked as though it was buried beneath the soil, though also looking like a huge manufactured autumnal fungus. Around the same time we found an old platform 4 sign that had been chucked away over the platform wall which he then put behind a length of old cabling strung out over the wall's stonework. Officials if they inspect it will notice this and possibly may feel out of their depth, non-plussed as if the rug had been pulled out from under their feet.

Above: Two months later and this proved not to be the case. A gang of paid-up delinquents (and not the real MaCoy) employed by Network Rail obviously 'knowing' we were nothing but cable crooks destroyed part of this mockery of installation and mercilessly threw away the Duchampian saddle, thus clearly revealing themselves to be the real Bicycle Thieves...

This is a war game with a purpose and we are playing with their cop minds, learning how to subvert their dead cells from within rather than ceaseless direct confrontation, which they would most likely win, by finally deploying restraining orders and stopping us from ever entering again the precincts of Shipley Stn. But sooner or later their patience will probably snap and enough will be enough. When this happens not an eco voice will be raised in our support to a man – or rather woman – (seeing that most of the natural history / eco organisations are dominated by women) and the doors of Bradford's pathetic eco groups will be shut on us.

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Perhaps too it can be said we're making a scientific breakthrough through a hands on investigation, like rough 'n' ready builders in reverse, wrecking foundations to find out what's beneath. No academic could have done this; it took the frenzied madness of ancient horny ten-handed sons of toil to take things to such extremes. What we discovered is the strangest, most contradictory of landscapes and through constant digging we discovered a neo-soil made up of a mix of limestone, coal shale, and plentiful bits of iron and buried among acres of freshly created, soiled over layers upon layers of cloth, and the whole stew mixed together creating a faux downland resplendent with 'new' wildlife. Nature has not created this – or ever could. It is "un-natural" habitat, something new and inspiring and without precedent, nature conservation with an edge. Moreover, the cloth soils of Bradford's industrially derelict sites – bits of carpet, webbing, stuffing etc. are intertwined with plant roots among compost heaps of soil, vegetation, cloth, and decaying slivers of wood. We were tearing up cloth soils – sheets of carded sheep's wool which act like weed mats – beneath them a tangled mass of roots, particularly nettle roots and above them a layer of soil made from leaf mould on which grass grows. Tearing it up is also like rolling back a carpet mat, though requiring considerably more effort. We also found ourselves pulling up bits of rotting fabric and even disturbed nests of wood lice that had found shelter between layers of something like Bakelite plastic. This is nature but also post nature and prior to the industrial revolution nothing like it would ever have been found; it is truly a post-industrial nature and we neo-Neolithic agriculturalists in reverse mode reaching out to the Palaeolithic past.

Above: A bee orchard and male Common Blue on an abandoned hub cap on the Valley Rd site near central Bradford Below: Purple Loosestrife on the 'garage' site and a Large Skipper on Bettany in The Big Field plus a pronounced ab mariscolare of a female Common Blue on the back of the Ilkley platform

However, over and above opposed tendencies and now towering over them is the reality of intensified climate change beginning to turn ferocious due to the rapidly melting Arctic ice cap. Over the last five years we have seen the movement of the jet stream becoming more and more awry over the northern hemisphere, one which is becoming frightening. More especially these giant meanders known as Rossby Waves in high-altitude winds have now become a major influence on climate and they can become locked for lengthy periods producing extreme weather. Our wilding project in Bradford has been utterly thrown by the sheer contrasts produced by these Rossby moments, these wiggles in the jet stream and / or an energy saturated North Atlantic Oscillation ranging from unprecedented drought to temperate monsoon plus almost everything else in-between. It's very likely this process will deepen and it is the factor which is completely beyond our control and which we've had to deal with as best we can simultaneously allowing for incessant rain alongside lengthy droughts constantly keeping this dichotomy at the back of our mind when engaging in eco wilding.

This is the fury of the elements and we are powerless to combat it. In 2011 it was 'the fire', in 2012 'the water'; all biblical in apocalyptic description covering the fact that suicide capitalism is largely to blame for this crisis. We can fight the council, we can fight land banks, we can do something about official sponsored herbicide spraying maniacs but we cannot personally combat climate change, well not until the example of ours (and others) anti car, anti spectacular consumption life style is taken up by millions in the highly developed world instigating a mission creep we proudly urge people to adopt everywhere we go. In the meantime despairing thoughts can grip your throat: is it even possible to create habitat now? And with it, the vision of a wildlife paradise fades forever. This is the fall of nature and with it human kind. The creation of habitat – what? – is it nothing more than the expenditure of colossal effort on a vain endeavour? Our hope is too much like despair; the last desperate dice throw of humanity an odyssey of defeat but an odyssey nonetheless. Perhaps it is now too late to even wild cities? Perhaps it is just too late for anything? This is unnatural nature, nature grown strange, alien, pseudo-metaphysical, malevolent, a monstrosity like Moby Dick defying scientific nomenclature that will take us all down – though this time not one naturalist or 'human being' will survive to tell the tale.

Moreover, the growing ecological nightmare is deepened by a further factor: the increasing separation between childhood and nature the more the screened simulacrum of cyberspace dominates the totality of a reified life reduced to a continuum of visual images. Whatever benefits can be gained from social media as a useful tool once spontaneous protest breaks out, is far outweighed by its continual dulling and restrictive effect containing any eruption of lived experience increasingly enclosed in the anchored walls of what is dubiously still described as 'the home', where finally all the gadgetry facilitating 'second life' overwhelms a palpable everyday life experienced without a mask in the raw. The children who once inhabited these areas of wild, rusting edgelands are being forced to let nature disappear from their souls as desolation colonises their very essences. Thus those bands of edgeland misfits, immigrants and what have you are no longer augmented by the cries and exclamations of inventive children doing what they must. Arching over all of this is an obsession with children's safety (a fevered fascination with paedophilia having lost all sense of proportion) the bottom line of which serves the interests of a capitalism reaching the edge of an abyss beyond which complete madness lies having destroyed all genuine artless creativity. To make the cyberspace factor even worse we are also heading for a "turnkey totalitarian state" (Assange) via Facebook, Twitter etc. promoted not be ruthless primitive monsters like Stalin or Hitler but through the auspices of the most avant-garde of hip capitalists; a surveillance that will at one point prevent any subversive movement, eco or otherwise.

Ecologically and economically there is no future for any of us but this is felt most keenly by youth as they walk blindfold towards absolute disaster. Yet we must act for if we do nothing, it is even worse. Nature for youth (as for most others too) is now little more than pretty photographs or movie sequences lacking the essence of the real thing. The pretty photos on display here can only be viewed within such a sober assessment. As for the others - the panoramic shots of various sites where intervention has taken place – they must also remain little more than dull records, at best graphs and indicators lacking any real substance. After a quick glance maybe it's best to ignore them; the real response is to go do something similar yourself on your own doorsteps ignoring all petty restrictive legalities. For certain the intention here is not geared towards a re-vamped nature as spectacle, a bland and self-satisfied TV-like exhibit a la David Attenborough or Springwatch programme....

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Above: Winter days/ Summer days: Panoramic views of The Big Field adjacent to Shipley Stn followed by a view from the field of the 'garage' site The 'hole' in the grove of birch and buddleia etc. is the entrance to a dark woodland path we created alongside the Bradford Beck, the clearing itself looking like the opening to the post industrial Wild Wood; something enchanted, slightly menacing, certainly noticeable but not all that much; a discreet menace. Perhaps it will spark others to treat it as free territory that can be moulded and shaped so the fly-tipping is put to use and changed. The Big Field was once a goods yard, an array of railway sidings, which local kids used to lark about in. Many are the tales we have been told by passers-by recounting such incidences and a particularly rich story figures in the following two webs: Nameless Wilding Personal Diary 1 and Nameless Wilding Personal Diary 2 accompanying this more abstract preamble.

Above: The quarried rock outcrop above Shipley Stn on which a chapel once stood (pictured bottom left). Now existing as an abandoned graveyard occupied by a spectral cat and alternatives inhaling a quiet toke amidst secluded leafy ambiences we have seeded parts with birds foot trefoil (pictured bottom right) in the hopes of attracting the ab mariscolare (the Irish Blue).

Above: wilding haircut council land beneath the former chapel rock outcrop

Above: The Baildon Holmes site is the best Common Blue site on the banks of the River Aire with 50+ on the wing at the height of the emergence. It is going to be developed and Elland based building company Marshall CDP has revealed proposals for a big Wickes DIY store plus a KFC here. In order to counter this useless development it is going to be necessary to expose the greenwash of building company, Wickes and KFC, for they will soap themselves in greenwash. The point is how to make as much telling publicity as possible and force the hand of eco-minded people and in that make many, many more enemies. Oh, that it were otherwise. But ecology is, almost in its entirety, in bed with capitalism.

Above: The Tesco environs off the Otley Rd pictured from the banks of the River Aire and in-between the Stainforth Construction and Baildon Homes site.

Above: Winter and summer on the former Lanolin factory site

Above: The upper meadow we created in the midst of the Manningham buddleia forest......The first thing we did when we hit the Manningham Lane site was to cut a passage through the dense buddleia and so join up the upper and lower part of this latest Common Blue site. The cutting of these passages took us back to what we did on Indian Hill (our name for disguised earth covered factories tricking the Luftwaffe) in County Durham aged 13 to 14. Time becomes confused and we became old as well as young. We were / are the new Neolithics cutting down the post-industrial wild wood this time. The chief pioneer tree was however not the birch but the buddleia though nonetheless there was the occasional sallow and silver birch.

Above: Doing some unofficial birds foot trefoil seeding on the 'ballast' platform of Shipley Stn - night and day - right outside the transport police HQ while the coppers were too busy on their computers to look out of the window to watch the seeming vandal at play...

Above: The Stainforth Construction site on Fred Atkinson Way just off the Otley Road. After initial forays where we chopped down invasive shrub and the like - and done on Sundays when no one was working in the offices - we withdrew for a timely break to pursue efforts elsewhere. Sometime later we were surprised when we again visited the site that the company had been provoked on account of our clandestine presence to clean up its act and remove the stacked up building material it had deposited on the site, a piece of land they probably didn't own. There is now a skip there in which to deposit builders' rubbish. It seems to prove this part of the site doesn't belong to them and that they fear the council or our 'authority' thinking we are powerful figures in an unknown official organisation and not just a couple of bums. Thus each of us is responding to the other in a paranoid fashion and our clandestinity has given us an unexpected feeling of power. Anonymity has worked on fears. Only by remaining unknown can we exercise this power. We are playing games with authority by pretending to be other that what we are: a hidden force and all the more powerful because of it; an eco-Bakuninism.

Above: The mile long Valley Road site. This is like no other meadow we have ever been in; this extraordinary site possibly the most varied botanically in inner city Bradford. There is something excitingly unnatural about it. There is a clash of primary and secondary colours. The purple blue of bugle, the yellow of birds foot trefoil and of buttercup, the flaming orange red of orange hawksbit, the pink of the red clover, the red of wild strawberry (see above) and the dirty magnolia of white clover. It is a living palette, a creation of post-industrial neglect and quite breath taking in its contrasts and unexpectedness, something 'made' yet not made, something that has been left to grow naturally in a way that has never happened before. The site is the home of the largest number of bee orchids in Bradford but the biggest surprise was finding a substantial patch of wild strawberry which proves there must be a solution of calcium carbonate in the soil. After passing under the railway tracks the water may well up in this long narrow strip dissolving some of the limestone substratum. This habitat would never occur in 'nature' that has been worked on by farmers and pastoralists, for this essentially is a post industrial nature. Possibly train loads of coal were unloaded here for there is much coal in this industrial soil in which there is a combination of base rich and acid soil. There are still patches of tarmac in the field strip where lorries may have once parked. By the gate there are several 'grasses' including wheat which can only come from horse fodder.

And now for something really nasty.........

Valley Rd is also a deserted road with a link to Canal Rd. At the Valley Rd end there is a shady corner of wild nature next to a utilities sub station that East European immigrants made into a convenient drinking den upturning an old huge electrical cable wooden drum for a makeshift table. Empty bottles of booze were everywhere memories of many an outdoor party. This slip road had it seems recently been sealed off with concrete blocks though there was still a right of way for pedestrians. Opposite was a fenced off site owned by Rapley's and an obvious landbank teeming with a rich array of flora and fauna, though we reckoned some birds foot trefoil would be a good addition as our beautiful blue was flying here. No problem, it was easy to crawl under the padlocked gates but let's wait and see but first we needed to add to this corner. We were respectful of this outdoor pub and seeded around the various odds and ends with care. On the other side of the road opposite the den was the broken down wall and permanently unlocked gate marking the entrance to the long strip of Valley Road faux downland. Unsurprisingly, the place had become a dumping ground for builders' rubble and the usual amount of mattresses plus a suite of comfy chairs and a settee. These were welcome and while improving the quality of this unofficial beauty spot we would occasionally seat ourselves in this excellent outdoor living room munching our snap. (See Below)

Photo below: Moreover these chairs were themselves alive with nature housing a very prolific ant's nest packed with white eggs in the rubble soil beneath. We had deliberately decided to seed around this furniture with a carpet of birds foot trefoil as after all upholstered chairs need a carpet and while lounging here a blue female might play nearby even landing on a bottle of moonshine.

This exciting, improvised situation was too good to last and in no time Uriah Woodhead's, builder's merchant had purchased the ground around the utilities installation suggesting they were going to develop the place which was surely a joke considering the bleak economic outlook? But then came the day in late 2012 their real intent became clear. Alas we saw smoke rising from the piece of adjacent land purchased by the builder's merchants Uriah Woodhead. It was an ominous sign something like the smoke signals deployed by Native Americans prophesying war. We weren't wrong. The bastards.

However there is now no way we can seed the Rapley's land bank site because Uriah Woodhead has sealed all access to this public thoroughfare linking Valley Rd to Canal Rd. They were developing the site probably to create more warehousing for building materials in the hope of some future building boom. Obviously they didn't give a fuck about the terrific nature rich site they were destroying but it seems the building merchant's vindictiveness did not just stop here. It looks to us that they had crossed Valley Rd onto the old sidings site running parallel with the railway line and had maliciously destroyed the couch and easy chair that had been dumped there and used by the drinkers as an outdoor living room. Not content to turn the chair over, they had ripped-out the stuffing making them impossible to sit on. To us it was the equivalent of destroying the cottages of the poor from centuries ago so all that was left are fences and desolation.

Above: destroyed chairs

Above: Late 2012. Semi-abandoned pop-up tent squatter encampment on the banks of the Bradford Beck and sheltered from prying eyes by the wooded parts of the Lanolin site. Possibly moved on by the Environment Agency now so frightened by the almost permanent raging waters of the beck which could undermine the railway line running above the steep embankment???

But then a few miles away much worse was to happen

Above photos: On the top of Holly Bank Bluff overlooking Halifax from Queensbury some East European immigrants obviously skilled in building trades put together a wonderfully inventive tree house (pictured top left) with superb views of the high Pennines. Here they congregated, slept, ate food cooked on a campfire etc. and generally relaxed in the summer sun, the whole scene possessing an attractive ambience. It was too good to last and a few weeks on, while the immigrants were at work - most likely on a nearby building site - some braying, fascised, possibly English Defence League thugs came along and destroyed this beautiful creation. The photo bottom left shows all that was left. A little later and the same pigs – from a safe distance - turned their hollering on us as we scoured these hillsides looking for Green Hairstreak butterflies. Interestingly because carrying a big chopper they didn't dare approach us. It was a variation on the old story: fascised bullies always are cowards.

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And even farther a field....

Above: The former sluicing pans at Woolley Colliery. Over the last few years we have also engaged in some hefty environmental intervention on this amazing site. Once the largest Dingy Skipper site in Yorkshire it has been much depleted by the ghastly new housing estate of Woolley Grange (see the film on this tragedy in the video section of both RAP and Dialectical Butterflies). In 2012 we made further inroads here especially regarding three former pit ponds.

They are like a post industrial painted desert, the base of the third pan painted grey with ochre (in fact sand) interspersed with blotches of green (hop trefoil). It was like a living palette as if paint had been spilt across it like something from Abstract Expressionism or real life Rothko's. The shapes are not natural either and yet these spaces breathe with remarkable life. The contrast between this and the soulless, manicured landscaping of Woolley Grange could not be greater. And yet the residents will most likely think these beautiful manufactured landscape depressions are nothing but unfortunate eyesores. And to think I had watched the rare little ringed plover hop around the perimeter of the sluicing pans and behind it the necro walls of Woolley Grange housing the suburban living dead. There is nothing remotely social about this estate – no pavements or pathways, just road surface, hard standing, parked cars and no people plus no shops! There's no greater contrast between life and death, hope and despair anywhere in the county.

We have massively seeded these pans but the encroaching carr woodland will have to be monitored. If we begin to fell trees we cannot do so discreetly. Chances are the police will be called -------. The memory of these amazing pans lingered on hours after we had left, raising our spirits, the three rectangular squares imprinted on our memories. Unforgettable --- an inspiration --- a promise of what could be come again the most amazing Dingy Skipper site in the country, one ignored by naturalists and especially Butterfly Conservation because they have no feeling for the new beauty of industrial dereliction.

Above: a gentle sloping away from one of Dinnington Colliery spoil heaps

We have also become engaged on clearing parts of the former Dinnington colliery spoil heaps cutting back the invasive spread of goat willow through the grassland areas which has closed off many of the informal paths through these delightful places. This means a lot of heavy work and Rotherham Council have threatened to prosecute any individuals who take upon themselves the task of removing carr woodland. It's all part of our campaign of revenge against couldn't give a damn eco groups particularly Butterfly Conservation who were complicit in the destruction of the Dingy Skipper because they basically believe capitalism and the survival of the species are one and the same. Already the butterfly has been virtually eliminated at Dinnington due to invasive carr woodland, so we had to do something about it. Moreover there's recently been a sizable rough sleeper squatter camp on another part of the spoil heap and lots of empty bottles, cans, bags etc were lying around. Around the camp trees had been sawn down to provide firewood.

We first threw down the gauntlet in 2011 and by the next year bikers were using the paths we opened up. One guy on a quad bike stopped to talk. People are wondering who is doing the clearing and for why? We told him about the need to protect the Dingy Skipper and that his quad bike by churning up the earth was providing the bare ground essential to the butterfly's survival. Ten years ago he would have been hostile regarding the ground as his own private territory now he was more than interested. Indeed bikers and walkers paths diverge; walkers choosing the less muddy paths which in any case the bikers find difficult to ride along. Interestingly, local people appreciate the new freedom of movement we are providing. Unlike Shipley no one thinks to use it as a basis for installation. This is more utilitarian than 'creative' but nonetheless really liked by this ex-mining community. They love the fact we are ignoring the rules set out by Rotherham Council forbidding any such actions and prominently displayed on spoil heap entrance notice boards, but then ironically it appears that recently Rotherham Council have been trimming the sides of the new paths possible spurred on (not to be out-flanked) by our very physical and in their eyes - illegal - interventions

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What follows is a blow by blow diary of events, (which has for the moment been edited as simply too long) theoretical speculation and conflicts with authority as they happened.

See the following webs:

Nameless Wilding Stickers and Photos

Wilding Transformations & Great Expectations (Personal Diary 2)

Wilding Transformations & Great Expectations. (Personal Diary 1)

Nameless Wilding (A General Drift) [here]

• 1Libcom note: https://libcom.org/article/comments-indian-york-stone-slave-labour-aesthetic-life-style-quarrying-and-butterflies

What follows is an edited diary of events, theoretical speculation and conflicts with authority as they happened some of which is alluded to in Nameless Wilding.

Language as Form or rather Dance. Orpheus as its highest expression. This is what Symbolism aspired to: words and music as demiurge directed at the reconstruction of man and nature. Conceived as the ultimate artistic act like Eurydice it turns to stone because it cannot break with the past. Orpheus fails to fulfil his prophecy and does not have the courage to throw his lyre away.

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One day in February 2011 we noticed that a piece of sparse ground at Shipley Stn where the old signal cabin had once stood seemed an ideal spot for seeding so we decided it would be best just to throw a lot of trefoil chaff over the hard core, granite chipping ballast and see what would happen. Unfortunately trains were always rolling on through this junction, at least one every few minutes and the logistics were going to be difficult. A cunning plan was called for. We proposed to do the seeding on a Sunday when traffic throughput was considerably diminished. Also we were going to have to be wary about railway police headquarters which was only a short distance away but maybe there were a lot fewer staff on duty there on Sundays. We definitely didn't want to end up with a £1000 fine for trespass.

Above: walking the walk and talking the talk
Below: the same area six months later

So around 10 a.m. one bright but cold morning in early March 2011 one of us casually tripped down the platform skipping around the trespassers will be prosecuted notice attached to the wooden fence down the ramp and onto the ballast, scattering birds foot trefoil chaff all over the place. Although we'd checked on train times inevitably (sod's law) a train pulled into the station and the conductress alerted was calling security on her mobile. The culprit was ordered off the track immediately under pain of instant arrest. Meanwhile one of us shouted from the adjacent platform, "The man on the ballast is ill suffering from dementia. Don't shout at him because it makes him worse, sympathetic treatment is necessary." A tooing and froing went on a bit and finally the poor lost, demented soul was coaxed to Health & Safety. "No need for an ambulance" we assured these cop substitutes. True, beforehand we had worked this scenario out as best as possible in such circumstances and in practise it played out a treat. Moreover within a year we had a truly incredible display of 'eggs and bacon' as the plant was once vernacularly and beautifully called becoming almost instantly an absolutely stunning Common Blue haven. Now though we were living in fear of the Round Up, sub contracted defoliant killers outfit, again always in the so-called interests of the Health & Safety Exec, biding their time ready to destroy wild nature yet again.

Some glorious punch-ups. Two Sundays later we tried to do something similar on a partially abandoned ballast platform that fronted the big car park. This time the big numbs in high viz jackets with fluorescent Railway Enforcer logos emblazoned on their backs immediately rushed to the scene even though we were only looking at the ballast platform. An especially authoritarian dumbo wanted to know what we were doing. We answered, "looking at butterflies." This guy in all his wisdom aggressively said, "Butterflies don't fly here, they fly over there" as he pointed to the dead official butterfly meadow which had basically been destroyed by the development of the big park 'n' ride scheme which was never opposed by the subservient local ecos, scared to death of authority and the law. Well this guy, this enforcer, obviously was on a mission trying to teach butterflies lessons in Lockeian civics especially respect for private property so there was no point in arguing. Yes we wanted to bop this arrogant buffoon with a haymaker but instead we just looked vacantly at him and then stared fixedly at the very tall trees somewhat in the distance behind him. After about ten minutes the disconcerted guy couldn't handle this non verbal communication and finally flustered because of our refusal to react or respond went away no doubt looking for a more typical harassment scene somewhere else on Shipley Stn.

What we'd quickly learnt in all this everyday on-going confrontation was always to constantly change tactics as this throws these stereotypical goons more than anything else. In any case this 'enforcer' personnel always seem to be undergoing rapid turnovers, no doubt on the feeblest of employment contracts and a wage around the minimal legal level which means they are pushed around from pillar to post only able to get their rocks off intimidating frightened, submissive people. However, the specific backdrop to this sudden intensified harassment – as we found out later – was to do with a spate of car break-ins around the station.

Above: Shipley Stn. Chucking seeds over the wooden fence fronting the ballast platform and the wall up Station Road.

A couple of weeks later we decided in broad daylight and at a busy part of the day – late afternoon – to cut down some invasive buddleia with tree pruning loppers. They were running amok just outside the police HQ shading out some valiant struggling birds foot trefoil plants which we'd seeded some months previously. Big snips out beavering away and a train pulled into the adjacent platform. Realising we'd been clocked we scarpered double quick for the lift shafts at the other side of the park 'n' ride so we could survey the consequences from the railway bridge. Then we espied this obviously psyched up enforcer scurrying towards the footbridge steps looking somewhat hesitantly at us. Amused we decided to let him grab us. Bounding up the steps, face red, this crazed goon shouted at us, levelling at us the accusation that we were "trying to break into the police station with a pair of bolt croppers." Flabbergasted we laughed out loud one of us retorting, "Why on earth would we want to break into a cop shop when usually we want to break out of them?" By then even more furious at such a cheeky reply he blurted out we were nicked and the real cops would be here within the minute. Then backing off he said we had the option of immediately leaving railway premises never to enter this particular station ever again. Even more amused we replied, "We ain't moving. Bring it on. Can't wait" etc. etc.

By then a crowd of people had spontaneously assembled including a bunch of Asian and white school kids. Performance was obviously desired by the motley assembly so we complied in order not to disappoint our audience, or rather, new found friends. The enforcer notebook out, biro in hand, then demanded of one of us who was really mouthing off "What's your name?" This was followed by a quick transcendental reply, "Fuck off." By then our enforcer was shouting out loud "Look I've asked you your name" followed again by the reply, "I've told you I'm called 'fuck off'" A bit of a set too then followed after the stakes were upped and after further insults were traded capped – from our side - with, "We've eaten bigger people than you for breakfast, etc." The final result: the goon cleared off, tale between his legs on the verge of panic, completely humiliated. Moreover, by then everybody was clapping and jeering him with one older, upstanding citizen calling out to his fleeing back, "Good God man, they're old age pensioners and you've lost the fight." The school kids of course simply loved it and noticing a look of adoration in their eyes a bit of demagoguery was called for: "Hey kids, never in your life let anybody tell you what to do – just fight the man. Don't get intimidated, just hit back" etc, etc. Responding, one of them said, "You'd better beat it, the cops are bound to come now" followed by a bit of simplistic bravado in reply, "Not scared of cops" etc (..... how untrue but bravado had taken us!) Then the lads left, all agog, one of them saying, "I'm telling all my mates about you. You're great" as clenched fist salutes followed, half spontaneous red fist, half the gesture of Bradford football supporters.

A day later though this time in the dark we were back at the crime scene seeding the railway verges again hoping that nobody was clocking us.

June 11 2011: Security Menace No 2 has his eyes on us on Shipley Stn. He obviously did not approve of us looking through the fence on the Morecambe / Leeds platform. Still less did he like us sitting on the station benches eating our butties. The railway station is no longer a social space

13th June 2011: We are both proud of our achievement behind the Ilkley platform and stood for several minutes on the bridge surveying our handiwork. We both want to see a complete yellow carpet of trefoil extending for over 150 yards. I could never look at a work of art with the same pleasure. There is no recoil here, only a feeling of fulfilment and yet greater potential.

14th June 2011: I suggested we extend the area by cutting down the carr woodland. We cut a path through the carr woodland that opened out onto the beck bank side near the bridge into The Big Field. Armed with loppers and a saw we simply got carried away creating a labyrinth through the woodland, which gave out onto the site, where the Lanolin factory once stood, though without betraying too much and giving the game away. I like this conservation by stealth. Now I am dreaming of yet more transformations covering the entire site that runs alongside the beck, and all done with the utmost clandestinity so no one is aware of what is happening. The aim is to create the most beautiful 'unofficial garden' in Bradford that will become evermore bio-diverse; a haven in particular for butterflies and insects in general. My aim is to be able to live in it secretly like a mole or water vole. I have a feeling I can build some kind of den that will go undetected, that is a part of nature and hence can pass unnoticed. It is like I am reliving my childhood. And I find it inspiring; a great reliever of pain and an antidote to the passage of time that inevitably brings with it terrible loss.

Above: One of the newly cut passages

I find I am creating a thing of beauty and to sit and watch the meadow grass waving in the wind (and which the Common Blue also delights in) is a deeply moving experience. This project seems to be a summation of my life that is taking me over. I can think of little else.

June 24th 2011: I could scarcely recognise the official nature reserve of the Boars Well it has become so overgrown and jungly. This 'wild' feature goes practically to the heart of the city. You wonder what other city can boast such a feature? On the same day but on the bus going back I listened to a mix of white and Pakistani gals address each other as 'blood'. Bradford, despite everything is never less than interesting.

17th July 2011: We sat on the rocks above T'Mucky Beck (officially known as the Bradford Beck) after planting the trefoil sacks on the garage site with some pleasant banter from the passing churls from the down 'n' outs Carters Arms next to Shipley Station. Wildflower meadows are not for the likes of them except to pass out on with a mix of booze and spliffs. But a meadow all the better for that!

Above: Outside window in the spit and sawdust Carters Arms alongside the magnificent mortar-less budd wall (left) built into a quarried rock face. In August 2011 an idea took flight: Why not stuff the cracks in the cliff face outside the Carters Arms with trefoil taken from Gaisby or Windhill toward the back end? And that's just what we did as well seeding the grassy top. Alas, though one of Bradford's finest raucous pubs, the Carters was to close a year later.

18th July 2011: We ate our sandwiches around three in the afternoon sheltering under the railway arches from the rain. A guy with a greyhound passed us: he was going rabbiting. He was initially reluctant to admit this but once we approved he said his dog had brought him many "rabbits to put in the pot" – a time-honoured poachers way of putting it.

24th July 2011: Coming back on the 576 bus from Halifax to Bradford Interchange listened in on a casual conversation; one, a young black guy with a child, the other a young white guy. The latter yearned for pre-capitalist times of farming meaning simple living. The black kid said no one gives a fuck about the dead and dying in Africa. The white kid said he fancied leaving the planet and journey to outer space, only the capitalists would have got there before him........ It was quite possible to talk to these guys and they would listen.

30th July 2011: I sat in the waiting room on the Morecambe platform in despair, almost at the end of my tether and consumed by impotent rage. I had been blocked on all fronts. Furthermore I was prevented from planting the garage site because a gang of kids were sitting on the concrete blocks above the site. In fact they turned out to be a salvage firm and eventually a trailer pulled up. They were scavenging for scaffolding. I stopped and watched them and they in turn immediately thought I was going to report them some wore hi-viz jackets to legitimise the operation. If the cops had been notified they would have halted the operation. Metal theft is increasing in the Bradford / Leeds area and metal drain covers are now increasingly replaced with plastic imitations. In Healey Mills Marshalling Yards I noticed concrete drain covers had been removed presumably by people intent on cable theft.

6th August 2011: This is such a clandestine operation, transforming a landscape piecemeal, hoping it will not be noticed by the authorities yet obvious to the largely poor locals, for it is to be their convenient playground too. Thus, nothing too drastic and therefore like the process of nature itself opening up places through which 'others' of all species will inevitably but remorselessly follow. Neither we nor nobody else can lay claim to these spaces as they have their own organic momentum. This is no man /woman land as after all the no-people from all over the world use it; no-people because they have no money. But has anybody else, especially at our past-it age, done such imaginative conservation looking over their shoulders as we were today behind the Ilkley platform? We had been prevented from working on the garage site as the guy was desperately beavering away on his automobiles working heavy overtime just to survive, so on impulse – not to be defeated – we set to work on the back of the Ilkley platform. We were forever ducking down, crouching and hiding from the trains as they pulled into the station watching for drivers but especially conductors who always contact security. For we have to remain anonymous able to melt into the background, melt into passengers at will. And our task has hardly begun.

Above: The glorious bare bones Windhill Estate as seen from the back of the Ilkley platform on Shipley Stn. A great mix of potentially liberated human life – alternatives and 'immigrants'- reside here. Most approve of what we are doing as they've also adopted the land below and don't want to see it developed.

August 7th 2011: garage site. The pods soon began to pop and seeds would fly out from the grill and land on the worktop. Perhaps I should be using the microwave on a low setting. What a learning process this is?

Yet this was the day of the Tottenham riots. It did not diminish what I was doing, for this is also a protest against madness, surveillance and abuse.

8th August 2011: LONDON EXPLODES. Is the rest of the country particularly the north about to follow? As I passed the Forster Square Retail Park I thought to myself this is the only place in Bradford worth looting. The rest of the centre is virtually empty of retale outlets apart from pound and betting shops.

Waiting at a bus stop having picked a couple of Tesco bagfuls of trefoil seeds we were asked by a young guy if he was walking in the direction of the city centre. He was walking away from it! This is a city without a centre.

We did a little seeding on this day of riot (9th August 2011), a police helicopter gave us the once over although by now we are used to this aerial sleuthing. Who could possibly have alerted them? D than went off to the Manningham site finding three male Common Blues. I hardly think the butterfly was there in the spring. At night we returned to the garage site to put down seed purchased from Shoeburyness. Twenty pounds does not go a long way. I was alarmed to find that earth had been scattered over the area we have been attempting to conserve. However, a further inspection we came to the conclusion the garage owner had become aware of our activities and feared that they might be accused of utilising land they do not own to burn rubbish. Ironically we both live in fear of each other and we and the people in petty authority positions are playing a cat and mouse game with each other. It did though feel salutary to think we were having this effect upon the garage owners.

10th August 2011: The day the riots turned sour with an inter-racial conflict between blacks and Asians resulting in the death of three Asian youth in Birmingham we knew fuckhead had triumphed once more. Yet the consequences may not be reactionary. Easy credit has resulted in a kind of curious abolition of exchange and has overshot its original aim. These thoughts were in my mind as I passed through Bradford centre's consumer desert. "Aspirational rioting" is unlikely ever to break out in this failed city. And it gave an ever-greater pertinence to what we are doing.

First thing we did when we hit the Manningham Lane site was to cut a passage through the dense buddleia and so join up the upper and lower part of this latest Common Blue site. The cutting of these passages took me back to what we did on Indian Hill (our name for disguised earth covered factories tricking the Luftwaffe) in County Durham aged 13 to 14. Time becomes confused and I am old as well as young. We were / are the new Neolithics cutting down the post-industrial wild wood this time. The chief pioneer tree was however not the birch but the buddleia though nonetheless there was the occasional sallow and silver birch.

The site is a welcome retreat for the most marginal, particularly East European immigrants. The most pathetic sight of all was the discarded cartons of Felix, the cat food. A primitive hearth and some blackened stumps of wood suggested the cat food had been cooked and eaten. It was heartbreaking, the sweet looking cat on the carton making this wretched expedient even more poignant.

14th August 2011: "Stone flags wanted. Any quality. Cash on collection."
We have been branded partisans of the shadow economy of pilfering. We attract attention and arouse suspicion and seeding means we are obviously up to no good. We trespass though in fact nature is the greatest trespasser, heedless of the ownership of property.

20th August 2011: De-podding tonight and ideas flowed. Concentrate on the heart of Bradford city not the peripheries. A success here would count more. But the real coup would be the seeding of the "big hole" ex-Westfield site in the centre of town. Was my de-podding of seeds at all similar to Melville's Ishmael up to his arm in blubber in Moby Dick? My activity rather stimulated the imagination: "a white out" it was not.

25th August 2011: The path through the wood leading to the garage has been 'roped' or rather sellotaped off. At first I thought it might be the council or the garage doing it but on reflection I think it is a form of 'arty' installation that has its origins in Terry Atkinson coming to Bradford. We opened up the area with saws, snips and shears now others are making their own contribution. The environment has been dynamised because of our innovation. We are the hidden facilitators.

3rd September 2011: Stainforth Construction site and others along the Otley Road. Amazingly found four male Common Blues on the Stainforth Construction site / Greens Health Fitness at bottom of Fred Atkinson Way. Prior to that had been most delighted to see a male Common Blue on the Tesco site plus found one on the Baildon Homes / Focus Store site..... After the Stainforth experience walked back to the Baildon Holmes area. Four kids were playing cards using a huge stone gatepost now cracked and on its side forming a rough table. They had a dog with them and one of them would occasionally throw a ball into the distance and the dog would chase after it. One kid was sitting on a smashed plastic stool. Security was nowhere to be seen as if they've given up or rather have been given notice. These kids were also drinking cans of lager and eating wine gums and caramel nibbles. Between boyhood and youth there was something sad about it. But it does indicate these areas are being increasingly invaded and used by the commoners; a foretaste of occupation perhaps?

Sept 4th 2011: Onto the garage site but the gates were still open. Paint had been poured over a corner of the concrete blocks blocking these informal, industrial roads; an obvious bit of Windhill Estate installation by an utter naïve who left his signature in the paint. So this is where the art school went? We took a photo with a spindly birds foot trefoil plant sunk into the concrete top. Will it ever flower? And will the roots ever bind to the concrete? Further down the tarmaced road covering the former Bradford Canal someone had dumped a load of leylandia. The sawn logs had been piled up almost deliberately as if this was a gesture of eco fly tipping. A hidden vanguard, we had set something in motion. This is now becoming a peoples' transformation of landscape with others sensing this is an attempt to lay hold of waste ground and to collectively develop it according to individual inclination.

Above: Various naïve installation displays below the Windhill Estate

8th October 2011, two incidents: When planting at the top of the Morecambe platform steps we were asked by youths passing by if we were disposing of bodies. "Yes" we replied, "we are doing body parts." One guy laughed and gave us the thumbs up. Bradford's Victorian cult of death and now a youth cult known as Bradford Gothic has become laughter. The second was when we boarded the 624 bus outside the Boars Well loaded down with a couple of trolleys full of plants plus carrying spades. "This is not a removals firm" was the surly driver's response.

22nd October 2011: Had to wait until three in the afternoon for the garage to close so we could get into the work on the 'anti-consumer peoples' eco space. Tore into the work rapidly pulling up a lot of buddleia along side the old tarmac path next to the Bradford Beck. Then must have put into the ground about fourteen translocations of birds foot trefoil we collected yesterday from Windhill Quarry.

We then moved onto chopping out buddleia roots. This was heavy work requiring the axe though afterwards we both felt very positive about the effort. An internal lightening takes places inside the body and colours and forms appear more meaningful, altogether much brighter as if illumined by an inner light. A revolution would also make things appear thus but even more intensely.

Saw a dished Small Copper behind the Ilkley platform. The trefoil there is doing very well though never well enough. There seems to have been the most desultory of attempts to cordon off the carr woodland between the garage and the bridge to The Big Field. Grey coloured old electrical cable had been stretched between trees in an effort to prevent access to 'our' industrial rockery. – the old child gardening of the butterfly child become old men...... and yet it is so ineffectual that we can never be sure if these feeble attempts by a suit (a council official) aren't also an art installation from the unofficial Windhill Estate school of youthful naivety. There is such an ambiguity about them and we are as puzzled by them as 'they' are puzzled by what we are doing. Does it ever cross their minds this might be an ecological initiative?

Hurt a foot when digging up in haste continental trefoil by the side of a busy slip road near the Cathedral Centre. Again if a police car had sped by it almost certainly would have stopped and then what? The job is not only heavy physically but mentally stressful too.

Digging up birds foot trefoil from Windhill Quarry I am always mindful it is a SEGI (Site of Ecological and Geological Interest). I thought an elderly bearded eco-type guy was approaching to ask us what the hell we were up to. So I rapidly dropped everything and began to scrutinise some oak leaves, like I was a tree doctor or surgeon. But I needn't have bothered: he was not the slightest bit interested.

20th October 2011: Mushingham County Animal Farm in the USA: the owner – Terry Thompson – let all his animals loose and then killed himself. The reserve had Bengal tigers, lions, cheetahs, wolves, giraffes, camels, grizzly bears etc. "There were many sightings of exotic animals along a nearby highway". Deputies went to the animal farm where they found the owner dead and all the animal cage doors open. I recall that in my wildly imaginative days in the late 1960s I had read somewhere that the animals in the jardin zoologique had been released during the Paris Commune of 1871. Something of Douanier Rousseau's jungles – insurrection and the tall grass parting to reveal a friendly, inquisitive face - though this time not the face of a simple, domestic cat; nonetheless the fierce instinct tempered by an ambient communality with a vision. Stupid, mad perhaps but we had more than a world to win.

In our 'mad' eco project in Shipley there are forces all unknown to each other yet each creatively (more or less) reacting to the others. We have essentially set these forces in motion.

1. The fly-tipper.
2. Those who would put to further use what the fly-tipper had left.
3. The vandals and the shifting boundaries between them and the art 'vandals', their youthful naiveté mounting informal installations.
4. The council officials who are perplexed by what's going on and don't know how to put a stop to it, their efforts to enforce the law becoming a kind of installation – in the absence of barbed wire, chucked cabling will have to do, moreover they have no money allocated to do anything else than improvise with the things dumped around them. In a way they are persecuted stupid suits with few resources. But who is going to take notice of them or their feeble counter insurgency? Only the really conditioned middle classes who don't go here in any case. As for the rest, rather it is treated as a further invitation to participate, to add to the wonderment of this enchanted carr woodland that bears a strange resemblance to a Claude Lorraine perspective of tiered, towering trees especially when the sun is low in the sky and shadows are lengthening.... A grand avenue framing industrial dereliction and rubbish.

And that strange spidery, drone-like UFO that suddenly arose high over these self same trees amid the banks of silver birches and tall goat willows. It hovered in the air above us, a strange, whooshing sound like it was alive and observing us. This latest piece of kiddy consumer electronic gadgetry derived from American military hardware some lad from the Windhill Estate had bought or whizzed suited this scene of increasing mystery perfectly. And the day was overcast, silent and not a leaf stirred.....

Sitting before this changing rubbish dump today we had a sensation of possession that our clandestine activities were bearing fruit and that we actually were changing (making) a landscape (not painting it as a Claude would have done). This impression was enhanced by two girls playing beside the filthy, often turpentine coloured beck – accompanied by the sounds of their laughter. When we crossed the wooden bridge we saw they had pulled down a couple of concrete slabs which had once formed the approach to a previous bridge probably washed away in the ferocious torrents that suddenly seem to appear from nowhere as a cloud bursts over some Pennine promontory perhaps five miles away towards Wuthering Heights. But these gals were also taking hold of this abandoned, morphing cityscape of huge potential.

The more we engage with this thing, the more ideas we have, practical ideas like piling up the stones in the railway station behind the Ilkley platform to create stone chairs. And as for the possibility of creating water features in the beck ....... And then see if others add to it.

And so we dressed up for our night time raid on Windhill, D wearing a red devil mask, a hi-vis jacket on which was written "Conservation (Un)limited" and in front a placard which read, "the beginning is nigh" and a crib from London's Occupy movement. We dug up three trefoil plants and attracted the attention of a man with a dog. We hurried off, he looking at the holes we had left behind and then quizzically looking at us as we hurried up the hill. Obviously puzzled he did not have a mobile to phone the police. Even so we were slightly nervous as we waited at the bus stop on the steep descent from the junction with Carr Lane opposite Windhill Quarry and sure enough two horse riders suddenly appeared. Yes, this area really was for the 'middle classes', those that could buy into the astounding view across the Pennine valleys. To further prove this several expensive dogs were being exercised. The continental trefoil planted here by a concerned eco council parks official is merely an adornment serving no ecological purpose whatsoever. So why not take a lot more and plant it on the Leeds Road site near the railway bridge on the approaches to Shipley market place; a working class / marginal area where nature flourishes and which the council thankfully despises. There at least it will be of benefit.

Above: At Dusk. Shipley Station

Going onto the station we planted trefoil behind the Morecambe / Leeds platform and then David posed in his devil's mask before the transport police HQ. Nobody came, as it seems security has received its full surveillance marching orders and Network Rail cannot any longer afford their presence as they once recently could.

2nd November 2011: Moved dumped rocks from the fly-tipping heaven enclave on the old canal above the garage site. Some could be called boulders and some were even bigger and let's hope this stops the council mower doing its worst. A camper van came along the road and for a moment we thought it contained officialdom some busy body having phoned them. However we quickly realised they had come to check out the contents of what had been fly-tipped. Maybe they had been told about the leylandia logs which they wanted for their wood burning stoves as they looked like 'concerned' middle class eco types, the type of ecos we could never get along with. No cussing – no cunts and fucks – here.

Above: eco-bagged dumped leylandia and stones ready to be moved to the Leeds Road site to stop the council's baying cutting machines relentlessly, month in month out, taking out wild nature.

We then went on to clear the Lanolin site of Oxford ragwort. And then in an inspired moment of derring-do started to cut passages through the dense carr woodland fringing the Bradford Beck. What to do with these passages? Let them grow, let them find their own form, let others also develop them. Let kids descend the sometimes gentle sloping bank sides to the poisoned but beautiful waters with strange rock features protruding from the river bed especially some intriguing post-industrial rapids. At all costs don't make a typical anodyne 'conservation' path with the usual witless Health & Safety railings. This must remain an invitation to the joys of childhood danger. Rather this terrain to be made up of tree stumps and rudimentary steps, indeed hardly steps at all.

5th November 2011, Stuck into the Lanolin site. This time we seemed to reclaim it for ourselves. And the contours began to emerge. Where Claude painted we landscape, not the evocative somewhat mysterious painted dream but its potential realisation. For this covered in industrial canal which John Ruskin unintentionally lyricised is like a grand avenue, a dream in perspective especially when the sun is setting and the rays turn golden gilding the tree tops. We began connecting up the different parts – the three parts – of the site. The aim is to create an industrial meadowland. I had thought the clay filling used to bury the canal was too contaminated even for trefoils. So I was delighted to discover that the hop trefoil that I had planted was beginning to really take off.

Taking the birds foot trefoil from Carr Lane high on Windhill turned into a somewhat interesting nightmare. I used night vision for the first time on my camcorder. The moon was high in the sky and the lights of Shipley and Bradford lay sprinkled across the valley bottom below us. The ground was very stony so it wasn't easy digging up continental trefoil. Previously during the daylight hours we had marked individual trefoil plants with white plastic tabs. I doubt if the plants will be missed but we were still expecting police to turn up at any moment. We were asked by three people from the poor Wind Hill Estate right down the bottom what we were up to. The camera was mounted on a tripod but one girl seeing D holding a spade silhouetted in the moonlight in front of a terrace of wild growth and trees asked if we were burying bodies - that same old Bradford obsession! Yet no matter how suspicious it looked, they merely said we would be in serious trouble with the police if we were. Typically they did not threaten us with the police as the ever so nice petite bourgeois do.

On the Lanolin site I then began to notice the industrial rockery underlying it all. Bare the stones and thumbs of cement and it will be ideal for the Dingy Skipper. These stones can be re-arranged, altered even according to whim, a rock fantasy for the Dingy Skipperif they ever arrive here. There was obviously a 'ziggurat' of stone from the old canal which I had glimpsed through the nettles yesterday like I was gazing into a deep murky pool seeing things and shapes like the remains of a drowned city or under sea water baby-like strange caves; an industrial Atlantis from ages past awaiting discovery and a second dawn. David had uncovered splendid huge stones from the long forgotten Bradford Canal. Had Ruskin walked on them, we wondered. The place has such immense potential setting us dreaming. In no other city is this possible. We are uniquely favoured. Built on rock, Bradford is the impossible city.

Rarely have I felt as fulfilled in what I am doing as I do now. It feels perfectly right, a wormhole to the future.

Above: And did Ruskin's feet in ancient times walk upon these stones of green?

25th November 2011: Two Gaisby Quarry translocation trips made easier by deploying proper wheels. If it weren't for the dead stalks of trefoil and a few seedpods it would be virtually impossible to recognise the plant. Today planted the Lanolin site putting down some twenty-eight roots. A cold day with intermittent, heavy showers we took shelter against the wall of the old canal wondering was this formerly a bridge through which the canal flowed? The extraordinary variety of scudding cloud in Bradford, David parodied in surrealist cum symbolist poetic diction "fish clouds in the sky ocean." I first thought it was Dylan Thomas, but no it was his own invention, a piss take of what poets make of industrial dereliction.

Above: One day in September 2011. The moment the quarry closed three gaunt wild horses crossed the vast cavernous region of Gaisby Quarry floor like they were being led heading up the steep paths where grass is to be found on the rim of the quarry. It was an unusual site, these bony horses reminding one of Don Quixote's nag, only this time there was three of them. Bradford is always full of surprises. On the same day Gaisby Top became The Great Gaisby!

We slashed an entire bank side and then some. The aim is to create industrial downland unusual because it is not natural geology and natural land form. Come some dry weather and we intend to make creative use of roundup – in particular exposing the stones to make a permanent feature.

Was the council called on us? We noticed a dustcart backing up where the concrete blocks have been set down to prevent travellers from using the site. We expected the fly tipping to be cleared on returning. Nothing had been touched. Had the council workers been rummaging through the litter in the hope of finding something saleable? And was that the reason two council workers in hi-vis jackets had come onto the Lanolin site maybe looking for bunce; a drink on the job? Would they have asked us what we were doing had we remained on the site? But by then we were moving off, work over for the day and to them perhaps we were just passing through? Or was this paranoid over-reaction? We have though a lot to be paranoid about. We want to continue as before, a secret, shaping force, devil gardeners that flit in and out of existence that cannot be pinned down, a dramatic, elemental force that cannot be stopped because nobody knows who we are. Once we lose our anonymity we lose our power to mold landscape and bring out the best in our unknown compatriots encouraging them to do the same.

28th November 2011: A poker game with authority. A cat and mouse game neither side sure of what the other is up to. What was the dustcart up to when it drew up in the lee of the concrete blocks just off Carnegie Drive leading up to the Windhill Estate? And why did they drive right onto the relatively manicured council turf? Was it to avoid detection, a few snatched minutes before returning to the depot on a Friday afternoon? And why did the hi-vis men give the Lanolin site the once over? Had they been alerted by the community cop who had clocked us as he walked down Briggate in the afternoon? Everyone knows something is going off. But what? That it might have something to do with ecology is the last thought that occurs to any of them. What a sad reflection.

We were surprised when we visited the Stainforth Construction site on Fred Atkinson Way just off Otley road that the company had been provoked on account of our clandestine presence to clean up its act and remove the stacked up building material it had deposited on the site, a piece of land they probably didn't own. There is now a skip there in which to deposit builders' rubbish. It seems to prove this part of the site doesn't belong to them and that they fear the council or our 'authority' thinking we are powerful figures in an unknown official organisation and not just a few bums. And each of us is responding to the other in a paranoid fashion and being clandestine has given us an unexpected feeling of power. Anonymity has worked on our fears. It is this that has had the greatest effect; the sheer unknowingness of it all.

The Manningham Lane site. We chopped out the roots of several dozen buddleia bushes. A dumped upturned bath had been used as a bench. Moving it we found trainers and a bag of clothes beneath it. Will they be gone when we go back to the site? Someone had lit a fire and cooked tins of beans on it. Were these rough sleepers or alcoholics? Disturbed to find a throwaway syringe. None of the derelict sites we have worked – perhaps 20 in all throughout Bradford – have turned out to be needle parks. Drinking dens – yes!

Above. Campsite for Manningham's rough sleepers from cat food to the un-inevitable syringe

My axing techniques continue to develop. I lacked the strength after three days of swinging an axe to strike at the thick stems. All of a sudden on Valley Road I split them in two discovering this was an easier way of getting rid of big roots. We were furious to find someone; some arsehole has seized the road from Canal Road to Valley Road, putting up a notice saying it was a private road and not to trespass. This was arrant seizure of public property. And so I returned along this road after uprooting the final few stumps on the Valley Road site. The gates of the land bank next to Uriah Woodhead's builders merchants were open someone having broken the lock. Why? Nothing had been fly-tipped. I think Bradford fears a mass occupation. Some goon from the posh Audi showroom nearby cast his beady eyes over both of us. Had he challenged us he stood to lose his job because I was furious over this illegal seizure.

What a delight to catch the West Bowling bus. At the back two pensioned nutters were bawling the odds: "Noisier than kids" as she sought to control a dysfunctional family. You will never get this sort of response and banter in west London now. Dreams of past girlfriends – all leaving or walking away. They have everything to do with the present Occupation Movement and in particular what we are doing in Bradford.

17th December 2011: Removed some cut leaf cranesbill from Bowling Common. There were little plants of the stuff across Lower Road on the derelict site opposite. Is the plant just to say moving into Bradford and has it brought the Brown Argus with it?

We cut down more buddleia on the Manningham site. By not gutting the roots earlier in the year we in fact created work for ourselves. It took rather longer than we thought. We were watched from the windows of the Christ Scientist Church which is being converted into offices. This time they did not call the cops. More curious and perhaps respectful, who knows?

But Cathedral Point has been bordered up and a lock put on the gate. However it did not signify a new wave of securitisation and to our relief the tall tin fences put up around Baildon Holmes were still down. So we spent a couple of days clearing parts of the site of buddleia and goat willow. Again we weren't challenged. I filmed part of the procedure. The presence of a 'film crew' may have reassured the homeowners overlooking the derelict site. Whilst clearing the site a woman with a dog came onto the space. Is Baildon Holmes becoming a public space?

Above: Easy chairs have been left at the 'illegal' entrance to the site from the bridge to Dockfield Road suggesting people are increasingly using it as a recreational area, especially a place where they can let their dogs roam free from the leash and maybe throw balls for the dog to catch.

18th December 2011: On reaching the Stainforth Construction site, surprised to find that the remaining buddleia and goat willow had, more or less, been sawn down! So it was only a question of hacking out the roots and generally clearing the site of small plants of sprouting buddleia. Why did Stainforth Construction do this? Were they afraid 'we' might eventually remonstrate with them and that 'we' were an arm of the Aire Valley Regeneration Plan – members of deputy PM Clegg's Liberal party's army of volunteers who would make good the original plan for sweet FA.

Only by remaining unknown can we exercise this power. We are playing games with authority by pretending to be other that what we are. A hidden force and all the more powerful because of it; an eco Bakuninism. Unmasked and we are virtually nothing.

We must do the same on the garage site. Remove the lavatory and cistern then cover with a groundsheet. We even thought about placing them in front of the garage gates. Unfortunately it could then be treated as a prank. A couple of weeks ago we had cleared some wood that had been carelessly discarded (in fact covering some of the birds foot trefoil we had brought down from Gaisby top) and stacked it on the fire area. We were there when garage man had set fire to it. Unfortunately there's no camcorder footage of it though we had thrown a scare into garage man!

A new idea: Why not clear the fly-tipped bed bases, pallets, etc and make a bonfire of them? We could soak it with petrel, set light to it, film it from a distance and wait for the fire engine to arrive.

11th January 2012: Lanolin site. Thought we would be here only a couple of hours or so; instead spent the entire day. We simply responded to unanticipated events; in this case simply climbed a mound onto a plateau to clear it of vine and nettles. Slashing with a machete we came upon a mound of stone, brick and concrete. It was like we were in an equatorial forest when suddenly before us was the ruin of an ancient civilisation. Except this is the remains of a canal lock. The topography of the place began to fall into place. The 'dip' must once have been a wharf which over the decades has transformed from a stinking black chemical soup to trefoil and butterflies.

It was by far the most exciting discovery on the Lanolin site. How many other people know it is there? It is like stepping into virgin territory where no one has trodden before. Possibilities leap frog; another industrial rockery, a playground for the Dingy Skipper. A plateau of trefoil. We raked the cut stems into a heap. If we had been deep topographers we would have sold it. But ecological practicality overrules aesthetics and dosh and sometime in the future we will set fire to it as it takes up too much space.

We have never undertaken a more demanding project and one so full of promise. Surprises leap out at us.

There might be the possibility that our sites of industrial dereliction around Shipley station may become a SEGI as time goes on. Although the official eco organisations are worried about what is taking place and keep well away fearing its 'criminal' nature they are not openly hostile though will never lift a finger to help out practically. This was to be expected and indeed it is something of a relief as it puts clear distance between 'them' and us. However the more it succeeds the more they clap from a safe distance and herein lies the danger. So we are walking a conservation tightrope. The whole place could be domesticated, cleaned up, tyres removed, proper saccharine footpaths made, seats installed, etc. Yuck, yuck, yuck....

The place just surprises. The concrete remains of the canal basin like an industrial Chicken Itza or an industrial Brimham Rocks. Within twenty square feet of this feature found tutsan, harts tongue fern, a single daffodil (cultivated) bluebells, box tree, gelder rose, wild privet. Why was this diversity so concentrated? Were song birds responsible? The wood next to the Bradford Beck is wider at this point. Across the beck is The Big Field. There's post-industrial rapids here too. How do you develop this; maybe some slight focussing on the water feature, or better still to leave it alone? But you could do makeshift dens and hides / tree observatories to observe birds, but executed so discreetly as if they didn't exist, so people walking through wouldn't really notice anything. Yet the whole place has been 'worked' and is crammed with ghosts; a presence you can still palpably feel.

Above: Aarons rod and wild privet on the Lanolin site

13th January 2012: Removed some cranesbill from Bowling Common. The conditions were icy but the plants were all neatly stashed in bags and trundled away. Then the bags started de-frosting turning into water! It resulted in a nightmare journey on buses to Shipley from the other side of Bradford! Expecting bus drivers to throw us off at any moment we were steeled for the first onslaught as melt ice become riverlets flowed down the bus floor towards the door. Fortunately the driver from the Interchange through Wrose to Windhill didn't notice as truth to tell he was a wee bit shortsighted. Nonetheless it was very trying and tiring and we were pleased when all the cranesbill was planted on the Lanolin site. Unless a person has had direct experience of digging up plants, transporting them on a trolley, then onto a bus packed with passengers then they don't have any notion how tense and nerve wracking the situation can be.

So we were physically and emotionally exhausted by the time we had finished planting cranesbill. But then we set to work clearing the industrial mounds of vine and thick-rooted bramble. Though difficult it was also rewarding, as with each slash of the machete an exciting terrain was revealed. These are not natural features as this is artificial countryside and thus formally more intriguing than natural landscape. However, nature has worked on these mounds, soil having accumulated over the decades from decaying vegetation and leaf litter. Would be interesting to itemise what these mounds are made of. In fact in themselves the place resembles an archaeological site, like something gone skew-whiff from the Bronze and Iron Age; maybe an industrial iron age where there is no buried treasure, no barrow covering a grave from 2500 BC. Yet there are things to be unearthed, revealed more by suggestion than explicit statement, so no one can be sure if there by design.

Above: the cleared post-industrial mounds which were then seeded with continental birds foot trefoil

Turned-up lots of bricks from the industrial Brimham Rocks as these are just the type of thing the Dingy Skipper likes to bask on. Thought of constructing a heaped-up wall of brick extending half way down the slope; it could though have looked like an installation even though suiting the Dingy Skipper perfectly. The brick will give off real heat during the late spring months which the Dingy would love. Perfect. Make steps. Well not steps, as that's too formal. Make unnoticed steps, even anti steps but which are functional nonetheless.

People are using the site more. The point is to encourage their involvement – to elicit it – without them realising. So they think it comes from them. It is the opposite of being ordered, told, commanded – the opposite of rules, of byelaws, of the constrictions of nature reserves. It is essentially lawless, a dream landscape in which each is king and queen. Absolute. Talked to a guy with a dog who knew a lot of recent past history about this forgotten nook. As a school kid he had seen the former Lanolin factory built next to the filled in canal, burn down. This area was formerly known as pitty pops or pitzy pots. Where the Shipley garage standing above on Briggate now is there were houses beneath the high cliff face. When the guy left he did not take the usual path but the one we had created that went from the form dockside through the bottom of the former canal basin.

15th January 2012: Cleared the mounds further and then chopped down a few trees; we also cleared matted scrub from around the huge stones deposited on the side when the canal was closed in the 1920s. This discovery of the remnants of the Bradford Canal was breathtaking. We never had the foggiest it was there and we suspect this is true of the vast majority of people who casually use this place. Frequently we came close, very close, rather like those intrepid explorers who suddenly broke through impenetrable jungle to find an ancient civilisation, a ruined civilisation. A few stone edifices all that is left to say it was here. No one though has been here for decades. This has become virgin territory in a manner of speaking and are we opening things up to intrepid travellers and then the next step on from that, of all things an alternative tourist venue when the place finally becomes a SEGI?

The water authorities in cahoots perhaps with the council are obviously opposed to people walking along the beck bank. Their ridiculous attempts to stop them like dragging sawn off logs across the new paths we've created won't deter anyone apart from the most programmed and insipid suburbanite. And if someone is adventurous enough to walk along the beck bank a few twigs here and there ain't gonna deter their questing spirit. We are essentially explorers, discoverers. Never has industrial dereliction been so attractive: the problem is it is also the fertile ground of a bad literary romanticism. The problem is deep topographers have the drop on conservationists. Deep topographers know little or nothing about nature and conservationists have no idea just how much they are in thrall to a banal countryside aesthetic. Indeed a meeting up of topographers and conservationists could be of some value in helping change entrenched attitudes. Both though have a long way to go before arriving at revolutionary perspectives.

Listened to a radio feature slot on Incredible Edible based in the Hebden Bridge / Todmorden nexus. Pam Warhurst the spokeswoman said through this food for free gardening she had never felt so motivated. Same here. Rarely have we felt so fulfilled in this most awful of societies where fulfilment is an illusion in any case. Doing this embraces the necessities of dis-alienation. However, it seems on reflection that Incredible Edible flits in and out of officialdom and some of the trendy eco, Small is Beautiful shopkeepers so typical of this area helped initiate the project benignly patronised by local councillors. Other people suggest that it has since drifted from this limited social stratum connecting with estate tenants catching on with the proles? We will have to wait and see. We will have to wait and see always remembering in ancient days the most extensive commons in England were in this neck of the woods and a powerful, even subliminal memory remains.

Drew up a list of some sixteen things still to do. Today, we did none of these things as the process takes over and one cannot plan. The bonfire hearth on the garage site is spilling over threatening to cover the entire dwarf trefoil meant for the Dingy Skipper......and Dobbin the horse was back on the Leeds Road site giving the place a haircut....... And then we noticed the warning spikes near the high-pressure gas pipe that runs parallel to the bridge over the beck from the Windhill Estate. Had this pipe been prompted by the promised development plans published in the local Telegraph and Argus or had we been responsible? Perhaps a bit of both. But felt nonetheless this site was being taken away from us and from the exploited of Windhill. All our work was coming to nothing. Dispirited we still set to work on the Lanolin site removing the six or so large rotting sheets of thick ply half buried in the ground. The ply had killed off the grass beneath and was relatively easy to move, exposing the mashed dead stalks and the bare earth beneath. It should be easy to sow with seed. Finally we crowned the piled up boards with a giant green plastic crate and so inverted its legs looked like the turrets of a plastic castle. When the surrounding trees come into leaf all will be concealed.

The council are still up to their silly tricks of dragging cut branches across the paths we've cut through both carr woodland and scrub by the side of the beck. We have now started to call it Fart Beck because it smells like an open sewer, emitting beck farts. No slick builder will want to locate a housing estate here. Well we had to keep saying this in order to keep spirits up. We then moved on to the containing wall of the former Bradford Canal to take out the nettle roots. It was very arduous and an axe was used to chop the roots in two. The roundup had been partially successful. So tomorrow we will seed the entire area.

18th February 2011: Dug bank sides on Lanolin site ready for seeding. Ready fencing has been placed across the Briggate entrance to the Lanolin site and notices were pinned to it saying "Beware Deep Excavations." Looking over the rise to the concreted section we noticed part of it had been fenced off where the beck 'bridge' has come away falling to the somewhat hemmed-in torrent below. For sure the council must have known about all of this for some time – perhaps even years – but our actual presence on the site had compelled them to go pro-active perhaps in fear of a Health & Safety Executive going generally bananas. For certain the council's attempt to somewhat cordon off the site has been partially successful as only one person exercised their dog on this a Saturday.

19th February 2011: Seeded the Lanolin site and the back of Shipley Station. Also pulled up a lot of buddleia on the garage site, clearing a substantial area ready for planting. Also stacked discarded bits of wood onto the garage's fire hearth – if nothing other than to put the frighteners on the owners. Moreover, they have been dumping plasterboard in the wood simply because as a fire retardant plasterboard doesn't burn. It was a tense afternoon in general constantly hiding from the trains as we seeded the back of the Ilkley platform. It was the same on the garage site as we were expecting the owner to turn up anytime. It would have meant further confrontation and it is still better that we retain our anonymity for the time being.

Talked to an interesting Canadian woman on The Big Field with a dog called Rusty. She asked us what we were doing having noticed us before. We explained we were 'developing' the entire area – deploying deliberately vague language not knowing where she was coming from – cop or subversive? But then she turned enthusiastic and honesty kicked in. She certainly did not want a housing estate on what she regarded as her precious bit of land saying, "Why not convert the empty mills instead." We were totally in agreement and she thoroughly approved of our direct action empathising with the way we don't ask permission, just going straight ahead.

Continued on the next webs......

Nameless Wilding Stickers and Photos

Wilding Transformations & Great Expectations (Personal Diary 2)

Wilding Transformations & Great Expectations. (Personal Diary 1) [here]

Nameless Wilding (A General Drift)

The John Clare Collective (Winter 2013)

What follows is an edited diary of events, theoretical speculation and conflicts with authority as they happened some of which is alluded to in Nameless Wilding

A young guy on the bridge seeing us with a spade and a rake in our hands said "be careful lads, there's a patch of ice ont' t'other end of t'bridge." He knew who we were and was impressed by our spirit. We obviously are being talked about but nothing like we will be. We then collected some pedunculatus pods and quite a harvest it proved to be; all this in the middle of February! I shall take a particular pleasure in planting (and germinating) their seeds. Somehow it is "Against Nature" but in a good way.

Above: Although Huysmans book contains fascinating descriptions of a natural world gone strange and awry the exact translation in English should be Against the Grain

20th February 2011: Seeded "the humps" or mounds next to the industrial Chicken Itza. Exhausting work. From a distance we noticed a young dad and his son enter on the path we had created. He appeared to be trying to bend the wild privet trees to the ground. A naturalist (of sorts) perhaps introducing his son to nature. Later we saw him on the garage site looking at the ground. Again our ludicrously shaped mockery of a grand project is clearly preferable to the grand puddle in the centre of Bradford and written about in today's Guardian. I wondered if a Dingy Skipper might eventually perch on a twisted metal bar like it was an 'industrial' branch. D said no, "but Iain Sinclair might eventually perch on it. "Yesterday picked up a most peculiar object. It was made of aluminium and hadn't rusted though moss was now growing on it. "What is it" I asked. The reply came back: "An early Sinclair."

21st February 2011: Two trips to the vicinity of Trench Meadows to collect around twenty plants of knapweed. Pleased to note that some of the roots contained sorrel the food plant of the Small Copper which really is increasing its presence on sites around Shipley Station. This trip wasn't tiring and nothing like the Gaisby trek. So come four thirty neither of us felt tired in fact rather exhilarated. We hadn't planned on doing this. Coming back on the 576 bus to Halifax there was an altercation between some Asian gals. A Muslim gal wearing a hi-jab got uptight about some free lifestyle rip-roaring Asian gals at the back of the bus who at times were swearing their heads off. So did an African gal who was shocked at the effing and blinding. It was a case of Fundamentalist Christianity and Islam at one with each other over this liberating display. When we got up to dismount I turned to smile at the effers and blinders and one raised her arm in clenched salute. Great.

24th Feb. 2012, a dark night. Tonight though was altogether more nerve wracking. Digitised train announcements have been cancelled – probably a cost saving measure – but because of this a couple of trains crept upon us unaware. Only the dark night saved us. Still we managed to put down some birds foot trefoil seed but the path now seems pretty much full with hop trefoil. And we must be extra special careful as the papers are full of reports about stealing copper wire and we were carrying enough lethal tools with us that wouldn't have stood up well in court. Then we quickly moved onto the 'hard core' ballast platform where we cut down some invasive buddleia. None of the passers-by in the car park took any notice even when carrying all the cut branches across the car park stacking them in the rough patches behind the Morecambe platform.

16th March 2012: Went on to clear the copse on the garage site. Suddenly the entire project is threatened. We started by drilling tree stumps and pouring brake fluid down the holes capping them with soil and moss, all in the hope this will kill the roots. Can these areas be saved from some rubbish development? We have somehow to involve the Windhillies; the proly tenants. More and more people are using the Lanolin site walking down the paths we have opened up. But will these people be prepared to support us? And does it mean we have to approach the Windhill Tenants Committee first? We are just so isolated.

17th March 2012: Noticed a hoodie with a dog. He briefly stopped on the bridge, looking into the beck, turned and went onto the Lanolin site. The spaces we have opened up are being increasingly used. Coming back we noticed a car parked on the asphalt of the old anal. Had to be his. It was.

Once back in Great Horton headed to the vicinity of the Village Hall to dig up doves foot cranesbill. In Ward St we were approached by a very young woman who wanted to know what we were doing. Her partner was an Indonesian guy who hovered in the background. She has lived there for six years. Immediately invited us to the local urban farm she helps out in. True, she was somewhat fluffy yet it was a genuine encounter. We described some of the rough and tumble confrontations with authority we have had recently and how in exasperation we had mockingly described our seeds as bombs which explode in the middle of the night as, almost by rote, authority immediately regards us as terrorists. She somewhat haughtily said we should not joke about wayside bombs and we knew instantly she hadn't got a clue about the state's strategy of terror and its long and murky history.

19th March 2012: Then moved on to the Baildon Holmes site. First though took a look at the "Tasty Fillings" site noting that some sections of ready fencing have been pulled down making access that much easier. Everywhere it seems security is being increasingly withdrawn. On Baildon Holmes the tin fencing is also still down and the goosander are still on the River Aire. We seeded on the Otley Road end of the site, a combination of cornunculatus and pedunculatus. Also scattered some trefoil chaff after doing a quick break up of the skeletal, stony soil as it was just too windy to add a mix of red fescue. An easy chair has been left at the 'illegal' entrance to the site from the bridge to Dockfield Road suggesting people are increasingly using it as a recreational area, especially a place where they can let their dogs roam free from the leash and maybe throw balls for the dog to catch.

21st March 2011: Susan visited our imitation grande projet in Bradford. Her immediate objection was to all the rubbish, saying she could not possibly take 'Yvonne' of Shipley in Bloom around this sprawling site of industrial dereliction whilst the offensive litter was still there. The aesthetics of appearance was what mattered objecting to the abandoned tyres around the former Bradford Canal. She then somewhat changed her mind when I pointed out that we had planted some of the tyre interiors with trefoil and were looking forward to the day seeing trefoil overflowing the big rubber wheels. I also showed her the cut leaf cranesbill growing in some tyres. By degrees she began to change he mind, a change utterly obvious at the end of the tour. On the Lanolin site we were approached by a refuse collector wearing a Bradford Council hi-viz jacket. Trouble coming our way (?) - the usual response - but no, he was really curious and wanted to know some of the history of the old canal, details of which, by the by, fascinated him. Like when we got stuck into some of the most lurid facts such as when the canal would periodically catch-a-fire big time burning for a mile at least! People always love that story. All of this incidentally helped persuade Susan even more as we blathered on and on!

That night we returned to Shipley Station imagining the next day's headlines in the local rag "Night Raid on Shipley Station." Black humour and blacked-up and then off we went to cut down buddleia on the hard core area of the Forster Square to Skipton platform. The place though was over-run with security and police and we were lucky to escape arrest. But it pulled us up sharpish: do police have unscheduled security blitzes? Is this a question of doing more with less security also maybe involving pay cuts? The community copper who unexpectedly came out the Transport Police HQ would have caught us red-handed. In fact we thought we were faced with an "enforcers" moment and we briefly left the croppers and axe in the disability lift. However the copper continued walking across the footbridge and we hadn't been rumbled at all.

22nd March 2012: Trip to Bradshaw just out from Halifax. Found mounds of doves foot cranesbill growing on a dry stone wall though it was all entwined with moss, which meant it was easy to dig out and transport to the Lanolin site about ten miles away as we proceeded to bus hop.

The police were still in occupation of Transport Police HQ on Shipley Station meaning another fucking failed commando raid. Are they there because of car theft? We are observing their movements like old style guerrillas or the militants of the French Resistance monitoring an occupying force.

Went to a BUWG meeting. It was a talk on South Bingley Bog. There is nothing inspiring here. This approach cannot enthuse. It's all about sponsorship and seventy thousand pounds has been spent on paths, railings, and olde worlde hanging gates. It is the herbilandia of wild nature and I would not like 'our' site to be taken over and developed like South Bingley Bog. Who the fuck wants special picnic areas, who wants to control movement? What we've 'created' is wide open; it attracts not repels. It is not a passive site as it is rich in features, far, far, far more so than Bingley South Bog. Reverence for hierarchy rules conservation groups. Here nature flourishes through bureaucratic dispensation; figures lead and businesses give life to nature and middle class women look on adoringly. The philistinism of this approach to nature springs from the philistinism of their everyday lives as Mayakovsky almost put it. Where are THE PEOPLE in all of this? We don't need picnic areas; we need areas for alcoholics - now that's much more authentic. Thus the Laura Oldfield Ford's and the Sinclair's will always have the drop on these nowhere people.

The improvised railing we made to assist people descending from the bridge from The Big Field to the garage site via the coppice has been untied at one end and laid aslant to stop people using the primitive steps we made. Feel this is the handiwork of some banal jobsworth of a suit. A proper manual council worker would have been much more thorough. Of course such a trifling obstacle does tend to deter the middle class but then this transforming site is not for them. For them everything has either to be paved or unpacked before they will take timid steps. They have no spirit of adventure.

Listened in on a mobile conversation on the 576 bus from Halifax. Though the woman had a job she was going to have to walk back from work. It was only Monday and she was already skint waiting for payday on Thursday, and how very like the 1930s. Walking actually is now a rediscovered activity in Bradford, or rather a necessity. It is maybe why people are tending to use the Lanolin site more and more. Certainly I have noticed more people leaning over the fence on Briggate above looking at the transformation taking place. Walking as a necessity is also opening peoples' eyes.

3rd April 2012: The bottom of the rock face has been cleaned up in front of the Carters Arms adjacent to Shipley Station. There are three green disposal bags filled with 'weeds' for the council garden rubbish collection. Why? Did Shipley in (bloody) Bloom have anything to do with it, seeing all the eponymous 'Yvonne' could do was complain about the rubbish on Stead St. Horticulture and herbicide go together – they murder anything natural. Horticulture and unofficial nature are at war.

The concrete blocks on the approach to the tarmacked covered former Bradford Canal from the Leeds Road have become an installation. Someone has sprayed BANKSY in fluorescent green paint on one of them; obviously a complete naïve, possibly hooligan artiste. A piece of table leg, a plastic carton partially filled with water containing a piece of wood, a broken DVD player, leylandia branches have been placed on the blocks. The fly tipping is being used as aesthetic material, a combination of installation, vandalism, fly tipping and feeble attempts by council suits at stopping us - all this is now coming into play.

6th April 2012: Dinnington Colliery again. A heavy day removing carr woodland. The paths we opened up last year are still being used by bikers. One guy on a quad bike stopped to talk. People are wondering who is doing the clearing and for why? We told him about the need to protect the Dingy Skipper and that his quad bike by churning up the earth was providing the bare ground essential to the butterfly's survival. Ten years ago he would have been hostile regarding the ground as his own private territory now he was more than interested. Indeed bikers and walkers paths diverge; walkers choosing the less muddy paths which in any case the bikers find difficult to ride along. Interestingly, local people appreciate the new freedom of movement we are providing. Unlike Shipley no one thinks to use it as a basis for installation. This is more utilitarian than 'creative' but nonetheless really liked by this ex-mining community. They love the fact we are ignoring the rules set out by Rotherham Council forbidding any such actions and prominently displayed on spoil heap entrance notice boards.

Above: The only memory of a dead and gone Dinnington colliery and its vibrant community. A useless semi pit-wheel memorial set in an equally useless and dead municipal park

7th April 2012: Previously we had gone onto the Tesco site along the Otley Road pulling up buddleia over a largish area. Returned today to complete seeding combining dwarf trefoil with red fescue. There are two varieties of hop trefoil already residing. Again how did it get here? Why this trefoil explosion? But no cut leafed cranesbill not even one plant. How long will it take to arrive? (There has for instance been a considerable increase behind Ilkley platform and sufficient to support a small colony of Brown Argus if and when they arrive). We scattered trefoil chaff around and about. It a fascinating site and we even chaffed-up part of a builders' soil pyramid. This visual demonstration of what could be done wit a heap of earth on flatland could become a model for the now virtually useless flatland official butterfly meadow on Shipley Station. On one of the pyramids a pair of boots was sticking out, like someone had been comically buried. It was an absolute delight; a supreme visual joke especially when combined with the natural potential of the site. It is things like this that make abandoned building sites and sites of industrial dereliction so interesting.

29th April 2012: An eventful week. Discovered an easier run from the top of Gaisby Quarry. It is easier here to lift the trefoil in its entirety, the plants being smaller and the ground was soaked meaning the top roots were less inclined to break. We planted the majority in the old sidings, dummy end platform on Station Road, Shipley. Whilst clearing up part of it a couple of Rail Response Unit employees passed by looking a trifle puzzled. Eventually they returned only to affably ask if we were digging for gold. We laughed and then explained what we were doing adding some bullshit that we were working under the auspices of Shipley in Bloom. We had decided on this strategy beforehand in case we were challenged. The Rail Response guys seemed impressed and had we slagged-off the 'blue roses' of Shipley in Bloom they might have been more so, especially if we had said they were only deferring to the example of Harrogate, or rather Bradford with GCSE's!

The Paribas site has been welded firmly shut. It is no longer merely a matter of deterring travellers and caravans but people in general. The buddleia has been chopped down to prevent the place becoming carr woodland. The reason for securing the site are those of Health & Safety, a sign reading, "Warning: slips, trips, falls, hazards. Danger: Keep Out. This site contains multiple hazards." Of course it does. However the infirm footpath alongside the River Aire (now in spate) contains many more though no comment is made about that. However this counter insurgency has made us even more determined to enter the Paribas site, even if necessary creating a new footpath down the Aire bank which a security firm will find impossible to block off.

Our chief delight on this rain-drenched day was to find at least fifteen trefoil plants where the old signal box used to be on Shipley Station. D had scattered trefoil 'tumbleweed' on this patch a year ago. The success of this illegal venture has exceeded our wildest expectations. The seeds may well have been protected from last year's drought by the crushed granite stones, moisture forming underneath. We scattered further chaff here and at the other end of the platform, heavy rain providing perfect protection. The train staff are now far less security conscious. Perhaps there is no one to ring on the station, security staff the first to face the cuts. We also amazingly found four young trefoil plants poking through the tarmac on the ballast platform.

Finally felt some sense of victory compensating for the setback on the Paribas site on Dockfield Road. This area had formerly been Shipley's industrial belt – and still just to say - is. However, right next to the Paribas site there was industrial building that has been converted into a dance / theatre academy. Calling itself the Q20 Theatre, Creative Arts lab, a banner had been hung above the red door which read NYDZA School of Dance for Ballet, Jazz, Stagecraft, Singing & Workshops. Is Bradford poised to receive the artistic makeover that was Newcastle's fate? Perhaps it is now just too late in the day. But if so, are we destined to play a similar role in bringing this faux creative transformation as we unwittingly did in Newcastle –Upon –Tyne?

Last year it was 'the fire', this year 'the water'. All biblical in apocalyptic description covering the fact that suicide capitalism is largely to blame for this crisis.

Our balustrades and handrails have been taken down. We initially thought the council was the culprit, however on reflection we think it was garage man in retaliation for our environmental crime scene stickers. The balustrades are going back though this time bolted through the trees. He also sought to destroy the steps leaving a concrete lump in front of the steps. The council would never have done this, as it would have constituted a hazard. If garage man wants war he will get it. We must work out our next move – perhaps dumping his plasterboard which he fly tipped in the wood in front of his gates with a message saying he has been filmed doing it and that we intend to notify the council.

4th May 2012: No it was the council after all. Garage man exonerated, as he was too fearful to remove handrails. Returning across the wooden bridge over the Bradford Beck we noticed the big, green plastic council refuse bin had been retrieved from the water. The most likely sub-contracted gang that retrieved it hadn't the gumption to realise the fly tipping and our improvised steps and tree trunk handrails were two separate things. In fact they may well have thought the steps etc were there to facilitate fly tipping. The tree bent across our labyrinth path through the carr woodland would never deter a fly tipper nor will the stones across the tarmaced surface of the old canal stop a truck driving around them.

Above: vandals and green council bins. Later we removed the ply boards pictured above as beneath lay perfect areas of cleared cloth soils where trefoil was to flourish

20th May 2012: Visiting the site and further ideas spark. I become aware of small, minute changes. I 'disintegrate' as I respond to these shiftings. I also start to expand into the environment, like it's a new me. In so doing that ever-present melancholia begins to lift, as I become a 'different' person, like I am also the habitat.

I had run to this site like a lover to their beloved, consumed by an obsession, which is almost an illness. But I lose myself in it and true love is also a forgetting of self.

Stopped off at the City centre to visit the Westfield's occupation; there is now a mass of birds foot trefoil and possibly the Common Blue is already here. We were allowed through the gates by the guys holding the fort but none of our seeding from late last year has taken which we had chucked over the security fence. It was then that D had an idea. Why not spread the seed chaff around the site, telling the occupiers why we were doing it. Clearly there is an overlap between what we are doing and the occupation movement. In this we get noticed but in a good way. The occupiers welcome the media but we don't! Still there is contact here.

2nd June 2012, The Respect Party. Occupation is almost certainly a George Galloway 'Respect' front; party political manipulation at its worst. The usual stuff – pretending the movement is autonomous when it is in fact organised from 'on top' i.e. by George Galloway. Explained something of what we were doing "that we wanted to seed the big hole." I didn't realise but I was talking to the Respect councillor from Bradford Moor, Faisal Khan. He was adept at trotting out the party line (i.e. the big hole was bad for business) but privately thinking capitalism itself was in a hole from which there was no chance of getting out of in the immediate future. So why pretend there was? Should Westfield's come back to Bradford; Respect obviously hopes to claim credit for that. I could feel Faisal Khan was not being honest with me accustomed as he was to holding back exceedingly careful of what he said. It was almost as if he wanted rid of me for I was an embarrassment.

I was going to go back to the 'open' assembly at 7 pm to put forward my argument but seeing I was going to be at cross purposes on the lines of the above paragraph I decided to defy this manipulated, 'democratic' assembly and simply chuck seed over the fence in defiance of 'Occupy' pseudo protocol. So basically I am reacting to them in the same way I do to Network Rail, the council or the land banks. The occupation of Westfield's marks the decadence of the recent occupy movement, a parody of its former strengths. While I had been talking to Faisal Kahn, someone welcomely interrupted to say they like 'the big hole' and the truth is it is a million times better, more interesting than a Westfield's Mall. It is a symbol of failure, of endemic crises from which there is no exit within capitalist paradigms. It is the objective correlative at the heart of peoples' lives. This absent centre is us.

Above: Where we could we have thrown seeds through the by now typical blue fencing which surrounds land banks like Bradford's 'big hole'. An embarrassed council putting a gloss on this disastrous experiment which, historically it has been so adept at, has taken a leaf out of Incredible Edible's book making gurky podiums to grow free garden vegetables in the midst of mown lawns. Interestingly nobody seems to take this ready food on offer.

3rd June 2012: It is like we are the anonymous 'disappeared' gardeners an invisible force of nature. Within the space of only two years we have created many viable butterfly meadows, a post-industrial butterfly meadow. And it all began with the contents of a packet of green manure from a garden centre in Brigg in Lincs. If it wasn't for that, I rather think the red and white clover would not be there. Finally we felt a sense of achievement as we waited soaked to the skin under the railway bridge on Leeds Rd. We had carried out a major work of transformation, we had shaped something, left our mark on a landscape. Waiting at the bus stop noticed how many of the huge 19th century York stones holding up the bridge have fossil imprints. Also on each stone there were a couple of deep indentations, which would have been used to lift the stone into place. Inevitably thought about the stonemasons who had constructed the bridge and how different things would have looked 160 years ago. And what of our 'project' 160 years hence? A wasteland of fire and brimstone with nothing left to show?

4th June 2012, Penistone station. Sunny intervals were forecast so we took off for the railway junction high on the hills near to Barnsley. The former goods yard has changed but not for the better. The mounds of old blast furnace clinker have gone; the place levelled and cleaned up. Still a number of Dingy Skippers were evident. However, Yorkshire Butterfly Conservation estimates that the butterfly is doing well here though in truth it is nothing more than their usual dose of rash optimism. We would estimate that the colony has declined around 70% since we first discovered it here around 2003. Mostly this is to due to the unchecked growth of carr woodland. The clean up, probably for a proposed park 'n' ride scheme has robbed the site of interest – the fly tipping, the thrown away TV sets, the abandoned massive heavy duty tyres. It has become a dull site and therefore of maximum appeal to an unimaginative Butterfly Conservation that fears industrial dereliction, that fears abandoned places because they are 'lawless' and anything goes, even for nature. The Common Blue was also flying and we must have seen twenty plus. Most of the Dingy Skippers still looked quite fresh.

Above: Penistone Station in the early noughties before the carr woodland became invasive

Next day coming back through the spinney on the garage site we noticed someone had recently lit a little fire by the beck around a primitive type of hearth and the wood for burning had been neatly stacked against the wall. This is just what we want for it shows people are actively using the place. This practise would be forbidden in an official nature reserve.

Above: Imitation of a Native American powwow communal fireplace on a Bradford Beck wall below The Big Field?

5th June 2012: It was a heavy day's work bringing with it though the onset of enormous satisfaction. We are truly creating and shaping. This is how life should be lived and the beginning of a new person inside your own body becomes apparent. Unfortunately the feeling does not last because the rest of the world refuses to change.

7th June 2012: Went around The Big Field with a botanist and counted over 60 species of plants and grasses. Typically she never knew of its existence and neither did Susan until a couple of years ago. I think Susan feels upstaged by us and also Shipley in Bloom who are perhaps a bit more abrasive with Network Rail than she is. We pointed to the steel fencing that separates The Big Field from the back of the Ilkley platform. Susan said it had been put there because the railway had been electrified ignoring the fact that it was a symbol of privatisation as against the ideology of public ownership. I said that kids are able to jump the fence. The botanist also immediately assumed it was to avoid paying fares. "No" we replied, "It is to save 10 to 15 minutes because otherwise it means going right around the station approaches." Before these ridiculous fences went up older people too used this convenient short cut.

13th June 2012, Huddersfield Stn. When I was waiting for the train on Huddersfield station I became an object of suspicion. I stood on the edge of the platform to note the 'weeds'. A security officer (female) alerted by CCTV came to check me out though she was careful not to confront me.

3rd July 2012, Valley Rd. This is like no other meadow I have ever been in. There is something excitingly unnatural about it. There is a clash of primary and secondary colours. The purple blue of bugle, the yellow of birds foot trefoil and of buttercup, the flaming orange red of orange hawksbit, the pink of the red clover and the dirty magnolia of white clover. It is a living palette, a creation of post-industrial and quite breathtaking in its contrasts and unexpectedness 'made' yet not made, something that has been left to grow naturally in a way that has never happened before.

6th July 2012, Monsoon rain. The downpour appeared to be ceasing around 1pm so we decided to hit Shipley and dig some squares in The Big Field where later we could put in clumps of pedunculatus. We though were to be hit in turn by the devastation we found there. The Bradford Beck was in spate (and how!) and horror of horrors had overflowed its banks and swept through the garage site and down Perseverance Road even uprooting parked cars transforming them into floating boats. At first we thought the grasses and trefoil had been laid low like crops are following torrential storms but closer inspection of the debris left behind by the flood confirmed our worst fears. The wood or rather the spinney on the approach to the garage site from the bridge was standing in water like a temperate mangrove swamp, or a miniature Florida Everglade, a morphing environmental frighteningly innovative feature of climate change. Is this the type of flooding event likely to become more frequent with global warming? Is there much more to come, much much worse? This would be like the effects of drizzle should the planet warm by 6 degrees.

Onto the Lanolin site: it looked like a temperate rain forest but minus the wild life particularly insects and birds. The dock, thistles, parsley and grasses grown rank were twice their normal size, more like aberrant creatures waiting to pounce; potential triffids as it were. The clumps of parsley towered above the site like giant hogweed. It presented an unnatural, depressing picture, very green but very dead. We were worried the trefoil was being more than shaded out and that shortly it will die due to lack of sunlight. Again the dreaded thought that forces we cannot control or effect would reduce all our immense effort to nothing. We decided to take a closer look at the raging beck accessing it through the concreted area where the site in general goes out onto Canal Road. There was still a surprising amount of birds foot trefoil, one plant even flowering well over a year since the area was seeded.

Above: The beck in flood and car parts strewn across our creative path

Venturing onto the unofficial path we had cut through the undergrowth last winter by the side of the beck, it was obvious efforts had been made to block it by the council, possibly prompted by the river authority, which monitors the beck. Where before branches and thinnish tree trunks we had cut down had been dragged from the undergrowth and placed across the impromptu path, now car fenders had been used as obstacles! The stakes were being upped. The obstacles had been mechanised and obviously brought in. We initially thought it was an installation as so bizarre; a secret security happening not meant to be looked at, almost an artistic negation. The council dump must have been ransacked for suitable material and what more suitable than car fenders!!! They seemed to sum up the madness of the age, madness beyond redemption exceeding that of all other ages. This unconscious metaphor seemed to be saying do what you will; the car will triumph over the wilding of cities. To make matters worse one of us this very morning had become aware the great saviour of peak oil was now a thing of the past and that shale oil and oil shale would more than make good the deficit. To show our contempt and inject some slight rationality into the situation we threw the car parts into the foaming, angry beck where they were swept away, mechanical porpoises floating on the flood tide. Who knows if the car parts weren't eventually swept into the River Aire a mile downstream?

We walked back along the former Bradford Canal. Only now it was a sheet of water several inches deep. The water would have flowed over walking boots so we were obliged to pick our way along the inclined, council manicured bank side. The battery on the camera needed recharging. Damn. Although had photographed Mallard's on a brief pond formed here a few weeks ago in this most atrocious of summers this could have passed as a recreating, a simulacra of the former canal which so fascinated John Ruskin in the latter half of the 19th century. A simulacra care of the achievement of global warming able perhaps to realise that essential part of the failed Aire Valley Regeneration Plan, the third opening of the Bradford Canal!

Above: Mallard's on the tarmacked unintentional 'new' Bradford Canal!

Perhaps it is now too late to even wild cities? Perhaps it is just too late for anything? This is unnatural nature, nature grown strange, alien, metaphysical, malevolent, a monstrosity like Moby Dick defying scientific nomenclature that will take us all down – though this time not one naturalist or 'human being' will survive to tell the tale.

2nd August 2012. Nonetheless, we were able to get on with out tasks clearing around some big old stones and ripping up nettle roots and buried bits of carpets which had become soiled over. This is the strangest, most contradictory of landscapes. Nature has not created this – or ever could. It is "un-natural" habitat, something new and inspiring and without precedent; nature conservation with an edge.

3rd August 2012. On the Lanolin site the drain gang were still completing their work. We were there when they pulled off giving the thumbs up salute. The problem had been tyres blocking drains. "Why should kids want to chuck tyres down drains?" a Geordie queried. We explained there had been an immense flood only a month or so and the tyres most likely would have been forced up the drains by the floodwater. Amazingly the drain company had not been given this important fact by Bradford Council when hired to do the job. Talk about un-joined up thinking, no wonder these engineers spent days trying to crack a problem without any background information! Moreover, The Geordie guy said in any case the problems they had to deal with nowadays were increasingly out of the ordinary and global warming and consequent freak weather was to blame. As a drains engineer he was at the sharp end of weather weirding and needed no persuading drastic changes were taking place up there in the heavens.

Above: The Dutch Vandervalk & Degroot company's drain gang on the lanolin site in summer 2012

4th August 2012. The Garage site. Because of the brick-stone substrate, the roots of the nettles ran along the shallow, covering soil and could be pulled up in mat –like formation. As usual, we also found ourselves pulling up bits of rotting fabric and even disturbed nests of wood lice that had found shelter between layers of something like Bakelite plastic. This is nature but also post nature. Prior to the industrial revolution nothing like it would ever have been found.

5th of August 2012. The exposed bank sides at the station are ideal for sowing with trefoil. Seeing it was Sunday it was possible to cut down the buddleia on the ballast platform without fear of attracting police and security. The point is to pre-empt the use of herbicidal sprays, and thus in a way, doing the job of subcontracted staff or something like the goons who identify with Cameron's "Big Society". So are we mugs? Or rather are we not thinking like the enemy in order to anticipate the enemy's moves, getting inside their skin in order to thwart them, to make them stumble, to dis-empower them; to take over.

20th August 2012. Return to Bradford and the great disaster. Shock horror! Never in my wildest imaginings could I have nightmarishly dreamt of such a thing happening. Yet it did – and I still cannot believe it.

The beck has flooded once more, driving right through the garage site. Yesterday's flood was a mere trickle compared to this. It literally broke concrete, tossing it around like it was polystyrene. A double course brick wall had been thrown against the fringe of birch trees we had left when cutting back the wood to make a copse, crushing some of the alder buckthorn we'd planted. This is the fury of the elements and we are powerless to combat it. We can fight the council, we can fight land banks, we can do something about official sponsored herbicide spraying maniacs but we cannot personally combat climate change, well not until the example of ours (and others) anti car, anti spectacular consumption life style is taken up by millions in the highly developed world instigating a mission creep we proudly urge people to adopt everywhere we go. In the meantime despairing thoughts can grip your throat: is it even possible to create habitat now?

I was stunned that water could do this? This time it had even flowed over our "industrial rockery". Trees we had cut down had even been deposited at the far end of the garage site. Everywhere the effluvia of a somewhat toxic, raging torrent wrapped around tree trunks, the woodland floor washed clean obliterating all footprints, animal and human. Is it even possible to even create habitat now? The vision of a wildlife paradise fades forever. This is the fall of nature and with it human kind.

Will the council construct a floodwall? The cost will be colossal and will require steel pile driving and reinforced concrete. But at least, as it now stand – or floats - the site is safe from re-development. Or will the council treat the garage site as a new water meadow prone to periodic flooding but relieving pressure down stream where the beck flows under the railway line and Leeds Road?

The creation of habitat – what? – no more than the expenditure of colossal effort on a vain endeavour. Our hope is too much like despair; the last desperate dice throw of humanity an odyssey of defeat but an odyssey nonetheless.

But to return to the copse. Again I searched for adequate language – a suitable metaphor even – to describe this scene of desolation on the spot we now call "the copse". It looked artificial, like an installation artist had mounted it. Formerly we had described it as looking like a mangrove swamp but it was an inept metaphor. The look of a mangrove swamp is natural made familiar to us by film, TV, photos. This though was a scene of devastation – and a touch theatrical - meant to be "larger than life."

It could have been a backdrop to a kiddie's panto, a burlesque of a swamp straight out of Pirates of the Caribbean. Yet I could only think of the Japanese tsunami still hardly a year old. There was the sound of distant thunder, a rumbling somewhere up stream. Might it not be the thunder of another bore crashing down the beck? I kept nervously looking over my shoulder, half expecting to see a wall of water coming towards me at breakneck speed. The repose has gone forever out of the site; no longer a gentle oasis of wildlife, a postindustrial oasis just off Leeds Rd won from the surrounding desolation. The threat of climate change hangs over it. Might not last week's flood be a mere trickle compared to what's coming? Could 20 ft walls of water eventually sweep down the beck, a reverse tsunami? When uploading photos of the first "post delirium" flood, my attention was drawn to the photos of the Japanese tsunami of 2011 which were on the same memory stick. The parallel was obvious. For the first time in my life I had witnessed what raging water could do, its power invincible. Those unforgettable images of large boats leisurely crossing motor lanes as if traffic lights had turned green to make way for water craft not cars – were they not the projections of our apocalyptic psyche, an anticipation of what nature will become in a world warmed by anything up to six degrees?

On the garage site each trunk was like an installation sculpture. A matrix of twigs and branches of right angles to the perpendicular trunk had collected around the base. Stuck to this matrix like it was a notice board were bits of plastic, lino, PVC, empty goody bags, their saturated industrial colours gleaming like jewels in the gloom – crisp packets, chocolate wrappers, glossy cartoons reading "sesame sticks". Yes, it did look like a theatrical backdrop or an exhibit of rubbish for fools – yet inevitably more sobering, horrible, fascinating because it was so over-poweringly real – no price, unnoticed, no foot prints in the damp earth not even those of a fox – and I was the first to set foot in this post flood world, the first inhabitant of an altered world.

It also seemed like an "occupation", like this matrix of flotsam and jetsam had been an attempt to improvise walls of sticks, mud, bits of plastic, anything – a reinvention of the wall. Someone had attempted, not that long ago, to construct a yurt in the carr woodland, stringing abandoned electric cable from tree to tree, bending the saplings to serve as ribs over which others, deploying scrounged material, would be thrown. Now the sheer force of the water had done the same, saplings bent over in an arc, their tips touching the ground held down by this detritus of a different soil – torn off branches, rocks, bricks etc. that had been carried along by a mighty surge. Nature's fury had become the final constructor, the ultimate 'recuperation' of a failed revolution against which no redress is possible.

24th August 2012. A forever changed Bradford Beck wall. We demolished the brick wall that had been swept there by the storm surge and now partially covering a couple of the alder buckthorns we had planted. Could I have ever imagined when planting the buckthorn earlier this year that a brick wall weighing well over a ton would be hurled at them? Snapped off by kids or even torn up by the roots by malicious council officials but this, never! This is the sort of world we live in, the unpredictable the norm, the lightening that strikes from a clear blue sky.

Above: The broken brick wall

24th August 2012. The cloth oils of Bradford's industrially derelict sites – bits of carpet, webbing, stuffing etc. are intertwined with plant roots. Compost heaps of soil, vegetation, cloth, decaying slivers of wood. This is post industrial nature and we are neo-neolithic agriculturalists in a reverse mode reaching out to the Palaeolithic past.

And then the contrast with Bradford – the empty streets boarded up shops – a city pushed to the brink – yet making imaginative unofficial leaps beyond the capability of Leeds.

28th August 2012. Encounters, human and animal...Cleared tarmaced edges of the Lanolin site with an adze a task made so much easier because of it. It's a heavy tool to handle and I also begin to feel my age. Again it was a case of tearing up cloth soils – sheets of cardid sheep's wool. They act like weed mats – beneath them a tangled mass of roots, particularly nettle roots and above them a layer of soil made from leaf mould on which grass grows. Tearing it up is like rolling back a carpet mat, though requiring considerably more effort.

30th August 2012 Orange Tip Hill and Shipley Stn. Over the tannoy came the announcement "police to the booking hall" Ah, we had been spotted! But had I heard correctly – perhaps the announcement had been "please go to the booking hall"! But you have to continually break, or rather, at the very least continually bend the law to understand what surveillance culture - continually avoiding CCTV cameras – can do to an engaged subversive.

2nd September 2012. Visit to the inner city farm in Great Horton. We were only able to look through the chicken wire fence. Some 50 hens and cockerels ran towards us thinking it was feeding time. Otherwise this neo-farm was horrible with a terrain of clearly defined paths bordered with strips of tanalised timber. A wooden circle – an ersatz of a Woodhenge – a wooden pavilion, a bird hide, a mound of earth and trees planted at regular intervals. It was just so arranged as to be unbearable. One of the instigators of this project had picked me up when collecting dove foots cranesbill from Ward St in Great Horton. I had told her about the trouble we had experienced with authority when planting seeds. To increase the paranoia of security we had said they were exploding seeds. "You shouldn't say things like that" she had snapped back. Political Correctness is the opposite of city wilding.

Above: The unbearable twee inner city farm, Great Horton, Bradford 7

5th September 2012. Nutters. Sprayed Round-up on one of the piles of heaped up stones on the Lanolin site. A nutter was sitting in the informal field area we have created. Were this official country park, a character like this would have given it a wide berth. This is countryside for marginals; a marginal's childscape. For nutters. For suicides. For revolutionaries.

6th September 2012, Valley Rd, Bradford. It looks as if Bradford Council has seeded the intersection of Leeds Rd and Sticker Lane. I cannot help but feel it was the letter I sent to the local paper, the Telegraph and Argus, wot done it. (The letter was a complaint about a council herbicide outfit, which had deliberately sprayed and killed off a flourishing cinnabar caterpillar population by the side of the main Leeds Road.) The letter probably won't be published simply because it will attract too much interest and trigger a response which will embarrass Bradford Council. One can only surmise what happened behind closed doors – as with so many things we do. Perhaps the T&A were frightened of the Respect party getting hold of it or Profs' reading it in Bradford's Ecoversity. Intelligent liberalism is even suspect these days. (Postscript: In fact the letter was published much later but only after the council had tried to rectify the damage by a re-seeding.)

24th of September 2012 Dread Redevelopment. It poured down all day so I went through back copies of the Telegraph and Argus and was disturbed to find the Baildon Holmes site is going to be developed as this is the best Common Blue site on the banks of the Aire. Elland based building company Marshall CDP has revealed proposals for a big Wickes DIY store and a KFC at Baildon Holmes Mills. I was in despair but then thought here is an opportunity to expose the role of Bradford Council in opting for development of a useless sort over conservation and also to expose the greenwash of building company, Wickes and KFC, for they will soap themselves in greenwash. However, we must continue with the seeding concentrating on the area adjacent to the River Aire. The point is how to make as much telling publicity as possible and force the hand of eco-minded people and in that make many, many more enemies. Oh, that it were otherwise. But ecology is, almost in its entirety, in bed with capitalism.

Took some footage of the beck in spate. Tomorrow I intend filming the Aire which I hope will be close to bursting its banks. Further info: Baildon Holmes site was home to British Mohair Spinners for more than 240 years until the company moved its operations abroad in 2004. Large parts of the mill have since been demolished and permission was granted in 2008 to Mondale Construction for 78 apartments and 8 work units. Nothing has happened since, nor is likely to in the immediate future. It seems Ian Lyons is the planning spokesman for Baildon Residents against Inappropriate Development. He said, "The area is badly in need of tidying up and infrastructure improvements. As long as the development comes with section 106 benefits for Lower, or Baildon Holmes junction, it can only be a good thing." Tony Lipton is the managing director of Beckwith Design Associates, the architect for the proposed retail development.

I get the feeling the residents of the two terraces on Baildon Holmes (built to house the mill workers) aren't much bothered by the 'derelict' site. It is 'Tory' Baildon that is most upset by it. It is fear of "Baildon residents against inappropriate development" that may have spurred on Stainforth Construction to chop down the buddleia and so unwittingly assist us in clearing the site.

27th September 2012. The cunts at BNP Paribas. Saw two Common Blues on Baildon Holmes. The male was partially dished. How come they are so difficult to follow once they take to the air? Blue against a straw background should be easy. It isn't. What is the optics behind this disappearing trick? Will I ever get another chance to film the blues up close on the Otley Rd sites? Sad at leaving the site I was losing something deeply personal to me. I was. But it was nothing compared to the shock to come. Not only have BNP Paribas welded up the entrance to the site, they have sprayed it with Round-up with the ain of killing off the Common Blue colony. It's an act of pure evil. They had read our web which highlights this colony and is now top of the Google listings on Paribas, West Yorks. Not content with ruining the lives of sub-prime mortgage holders, nature now has to be destroyed. Cunts, cunts, cunts was all I could say.

Above: BNP Paribas site in autumn and summer before Round Up. Note the mat of hop trefoil.
Below: BNP Paribas site after Round up. Death to nature!

16th October 2012. Removed the clods from the squares we dug in the Big Field. These squares are one large ants nest (myramica rubra) and we found hundreds of ant's eggs everywhere when turning over the sods. I accidentally dug into an ant's nest but the ants were so docile they barely moved. We were going to sling the old turf by the side of the steel fencing separating Shipley Stn from the Big Field. However, in an instant I decided to create visible mounds of turf in the field. The topography is thus altered, a sort of wartime-like installation we would hide behind – yet also planted. We never planned on doing this as the idea suddenly flashed into my mind and we acted upon it. This sort of thing must have happened on a daily basis on the old commons of yore.

Seeded some more of the Lanolin site – around the exposed rocks and up by the Briggate entrance. Underneath the thin layer of soil was tarmac. We decided this was not a basin after all but a quay where carters would draw up, load up from the barges and take their carts out onto Briggate over the canal bridge. What a transformation is being wrought here. And yet the past matters, not just because of the man-made 'anti-natural' topography but also because of the effect it has upon the wildlife that has colonised it. After finishing the seed under the railway bridges we went on to seed across the Leeds Rd. Someone from Killipps carpet shop came across to ask us what we were doing. He was curious, genial even though initially we were expecting hostility. We explained to him adding, "We aren't planting marijuana seed". "That wouldn't stay long around here" he smilingly replied and how different from the hi-viz "I'm calling the police" responses.

Above: The birds foot trefoil seed is planted in the foreground area

17th October 2012. Attempted to dig up full-grown pedunctulatus plants from the Canal Rd entrance to the Boars Well. It was a depressing experience – the stems were much longer than last year's and were scarcely anchored in the ground their stems coming away in handfuls making it difficult to locate where the plant was rooted. This all had to do with rain sodden months producing vegetation mass with little flower. Nevertheless we got about ten plants away, bagging and replanting them in the far corner of The Big Field in Shipley. Felt somewhat better for doing this. We will try clearing around the remaining trefoil then adzing the plants out. Once the squares are filled with trefoil then the fake starts of the last couple of years may be overcome – and trefoil will forever reign triumphal in The Big Field and the Common Blue with it. But even 2 degrees warming could scotch this reasonable hope.

We then moved on to Valley Rd to carry out the final translocation. The builders' merchants, Uriah Woodhead had purchased a postage-sized piece of land to much fanfare proclaiming their purchase everywhere in advertising frenzy. They had even placed puny branches of elder across the concrete road barrier blocking one entrance to what is, after all, a public road they've illegally seized. Infuriated, we immediately removed them as if they were likely to deter anyone except an inveterate suburbanite who won't even venture outside if there is a chance of a shower.

As we walked the length of the left hand side of the strip of land by the railway that is Valley Rd I noticed a spectral tree trunk in the distance. Was it an effect of light? As we got near it, I realised someone had sprayed it with silver paint. Artists have followed our intervention as in Shipley though also by authority for there were deep tyre tracks running the length of this part of the site. Had we also attracted the attention of Network Rail just as we had the council on the garage site? In this three cornered dance not one 'performer' is entirely sure of the motives of the other two, or there reasons for being there. The 'artist' who had spray painted the still living stump silver would not have noticed the wild strawberry plants surrounding it – and therefore sussed that the reason we lopped the goat willow – in order to expose the small strawberry plants to sunlight.

Anyway we dug up about eight plants of cornunctulatus and transported them to the other end of the site towards Frizinghall to where I had seen Common Blues sporting on a sunlit patch devoid of trefoil in September. There is no need to do any more translocating here as the birds foot trefoil we translocated last year is doing very well here. So at least this part of the project is finished. We then dug up several plants of Michaelmas daisies filling three heavy duty sacks leaving them behind an abandoned armchair to be taken tomorrow to The Big Field.

18th October 2012. Translocated the Michaelmas daisies from Valley Rd. What a performance! The minibus went all round the houses and at each turn of the road I was looking to see if a mother with a pram was waiting at a bus stop. In Wrose a wheel chair user got on pushed by a youth whom I reckon was not a relative or volunteer but a workfare victim. This is hardly the 'big' caring society but brute coercion instead.

We shoved the daisies into a small patch of the far end of The Big Field. I jumped out of my skin when someone suddenly said "Hello" – a long-haired somewhat refined guy, very definitely a Shipleyite alternative but with a workers' outlook he could remember when this area was all railway sidings and when as a youth he would take coal from the rail trucks drawn up in sidings. This was his playground just as ours had been railway sidings too. He had like us sold scrap metal even like us too attempting to sell lengths of rail track and again like us, the scrap dealers refusing to buy them even in those far off mid 1950s days. As Crossley's scrap metal dealers bordered the Bradford Beck what he and others did was to chuck the scrap metal out of Crossley's yard then take it back into the yard – and sell it back to them! The Bradford Beck had also been a storage depot for purloined metal and he would regularly tread its banks looking for metal. Later (as we remembered) this was also a place where stolen cars were dumped and set on fire remembering when not too long ago five cars had been driven into the beck. We indeed remembered over ten years ago when young teenagers would assemble at the top of the bank sides and view the burnt out wreckage in the stream below. Word would get out fast. Now there are bollards at the entrance to Leeds Rd, which acts as a barrier though also stops the field from becoming a traveller's encampment. However, it does not stop us from reshaping this marginal area, the fact that it has such a history making it easier for us to do so. This no-go area was now liked by middle class naturalists precisely for this reason, though for us it was an opportunity for reinvention in an anti aesthetic, anti commercial way.

Thanks to our scrap metal 'thief' a distant memory erupted deep from within. The cash that I got from selling scrap metal when a kid I put in a box hiding it on top of the outhouse roof in nearby Ossett promptly forgetting about it. Later a roofer who then gave it to my mother found it. As children then money held no attraction even though we were prepared to sell scrap metal. But then what to do with it as couldn't purchase anything we wanted for we had dreams money couldn't buy and we lived for these dreams. Entire weeks would pass without any of us touching money or carrying any in our pockets apart from school dinner money. Later the entirely practicable notion of a world without money came very natural to us......I asked our scrap metal guy on the Big Field if he had seen the Eric Francis ad on the back of local Bradford Arriva buses (Eric Francis is a present day scrap dealer in Ossett – and dares to depict an alluring bling-obsessed woman to advertise his firm. All tit and bum with a leg on the table beside her are not diamond rings and jewels but lengths of copper tubing!) A self-promo form of send advertising we all laughed at it, our scrap metal chancer more aware than even we were, the metal market had collapsed. The reason? – the approaching end of the Chinese property boom. On a hoped for urban commons, everything was up for discussion – in front of recently planted stands of tansy and Michaelmas daisies.

3rd November 2012. Woolley Colliery. Again collected several big bags of continental trefoil seed pods to deposit in the nearby old pit sluicing pans which are now dry and at the entrance to the spoil heaps from the Darton / Woolley Grange Road. In fact there was far more trefoil in the pans than I had ever dared hope. All three ex-pit ponds should be covered in birds foot trefoil in three years time and hopefully will bring the threatened Dingy Skipper with it. I am pretty certain the Common Blue is already here. Actually there are two types of birds foot trefoil here, the cornunculatus and pedunctulatus. But why has it taken so long to get here? There are also considerable amounts of hop trefoil and black medick. I spent sometime filming the old sluicing pans, as they are amazing. They are like a post industrial painted desert, the base of the third pan painted grey with ochre (in fact sand) interspersed with blotches of green (hop trefoil). It was like a living palette as if paint had been spilt across it like something from Abstract Expressionism or real life Rothko's. The shapes are not natural either and yet these spaces breathe with remarkable life.

The contrast between this and the soulless, manicured landscaping of Woolley Grange could not be greater. And yet the residents will most likely think these beautiful manufactured landscape depressions are nothing but unfortunate eyesores. And to think I had watched the rare Little Ringed Plover hop around the perimeter of the sluicing pans and behind it the necro walls of Woolley Grange housing the suburban living dead. There is nothing remotely social about this estate – no pavements or pathways, just road surface, hard standing, parked cars and no people plus no shops! There's no greater contrast between life and death, hope and despair anywhere in the county.

In the pans the encroaching carr woodland will have to be monitored. If we begin to fell trees we cannot do so discreetly. Chances are the police will be called -------. The memory of these amazing pans lingered on hours after we had left, raising our spirits, the three rectangular squares imprinted on our memories. Unforgettable --- an inspiration --- a promise of what could be the most amazing Dingy Skipper site in the country. However, ignored by naturalists and especially Butterfly Conservation because they have no feeling for the new beauty of industrial dereliction.

We finished the day off by scattering pedunctulatis trefoil seed pods around the upper entrance of the Darton / Woolley Rd. Photographed a strange installation on the way back from the spoil heap to Darton Stn. Someone had sprayed fly-agaric mushrooms plus the bowl of a birch tree with silver paint just like someone had done with the stump of a goat willow on the Valley Rd site in Bradford. Basically both 'interventions' were indistinguishable in style. Was it the same person? Are we being shadowed? Or rather than 'Pitman Painters' were these examples evidence of 'Post Pitmen Conceptualists'? Or was installation ceasing to be a conscious 'artistic' act and becoming a more random activity? A sort of posting of meaningless signs; signs posting a gathering madness, which will never end up on a gallery wall even as a photograph. And yet we were both sure this 'still life' had been photographed. Is it the fashion for edgelands that attracts? Or is this the direction tags and pieces are now taking, something which is local and not done by art students from Sheffield and Leeds?

4th November 2012. As it was a Sunday and security generally absent and fewer trains we decided to clear bracken from the back of the Ilkley platform on Shipley Stn and then seed with birds foot trefoil. It was relatively easy to turn the soil over once the bracken had been cleared and much easier than if it had been covered in grass, which through its roots tends to mat the soil together. We dug up both sides of a culvert containing signalling cable. It was very visible work and certainly the most visible alterations we have ever carried out around the station. We provoked things further by piling up stones and slabs into a bogus installation deliberately to attract attention. If it goes unnoticed it will tell us much, namely that there has been a considerable decrease in surveillance due to lay-offs. Or perhaps if noticed, station staff will be afraid to do anything about it because it looks artistic but also eco and the station staff do not want to be accused of philistinism and, more importantly, wasting Network Rail's money by drawing attention to it, especially as the latter's finances are deeply in the red!

From a pile of stones (which will provide essential basking habitat for the Dingy Skipper) it became 'installation' when I stuck a shattered piece of rusting drain pipe in it and then adding to it by piling a regular grid of oblong block of concrete on the pile. Meanwhile I had found an abandoned bike saddle which Duchampian-like I deliberately stuck in the ground (never thankfully to get into an art gallery) and the rest of the bike looked as though it was buried beneath the soil, though also looking like a huge manufactured autumnal fungus. D around the same time had found an old platform 4 sign that had been chucked away over the platform wall which he then put behind a length of old cabling strung out over the wall's stonework. Officials if they inspect it will notice this and possibly may feel out of their depth, non-plussed as if the rug had been pulled out from under their feet.

This is a war game with a purpose and we are playing with their cop minds, learning how to subvert their dead cells from within rather than ceaseless direct confrontation, which they would most likely win, by deploying restraining orders and stopping us from ever entering again the precincts of Shipley Stn. But sooner or later their patience will probably snap and enough will be enough. When this happens not an eco voice will be raised in our support to a man – or rather woman – and the doors of Bradford's pathetic eco groups will be shut on us.

23rd November 2012, Valley Rd. Last time I was in Bradford I had seen smoke rising from the piece of adjacent land purchased by the builder's merchants Uriah Woodhead. It was an ominous sign something like the smoke signals deployed by Native Americans prophesying war. I was not wrong. Getting off the bus with our trollies we had intended digging up some Michaelmas daisies and o turning the corner we found the road had been completely fenced off. The bastards. So we were forced to go up to the railway bridge which added a further half a mile each way. My mind was in turmoil: what if the entire Valley Rd site had been completely sealed off. But this response was OTT because we need not have worried.

However there is now no way we can seed the Rapley's land bank site because Uriah Woodhead has sealed all access to this public thoroughfare linking Valley Rd to Canal Rd. To me it looks like an illegal act of enclosure but with the connivance of the council. The tiny triangle of land Woodhead has purchased is an East European drinking den. It seems the building merchant's vindictiveness did not just stop here. It looks to us that they had crossed Valley Rd into the old sidings site running parallel with the railway line and had maliciously destroyed the couch and easy chair that had been dumped there and used by the drinkers as an outdoor living room. Not content to turn the chair over, they had ripped-out the stuffing making them impossible to sit on. To me it was the equivalent of destroying the cottages of the poor from centuries ago so all that was left are fences and desolation. We then noticed someone had sprayed up in silver paint "Wake Up Sheeples" about a quarter of a mile away a stump of goat willow had been sprayed with the same paint. Are we being shadowed? This is art drifting into genuine contestation.

See the other webs in this trilogy:

Nameless Wilding Stickers and Photos

Wilding Transformations & Great Expectations (Personal Diary 2) [here]

Wilding Transformations & Great Expectations. (Personal Diary 1)

Nameless Wilding (A General Drift)

Written by: The John Clare Collective (Winter 2013)

Green Hairstreaks and facing basement steps with Indian sandstone: An oracle of butterflies and a job with unforeseen consequences......

My story begins one gloriously fine day on the 23rd of April 2011. I had gone to Ilkley Moor in West Yorkshire to check to see if the Green Hairstreak butterfly had recovered from the very harsh winter cold snaps of the previous two years, which has particularly decimated their numbers on the lower slopes of the formerly highly industrialized valleys of West Yorkshire. Having ascended half way up the moors, I headed for the top of a former quarry just above White Wells, once noted for its palliative spa waters and where Darwin, recoiling before the dread glare of publicity and inevitable scandal, had sought a stay of execution bathing in the spa water and wrapping himself in inconsolable anonymity for a last few days, just prior to the publication of the world shaking The Origin of the Species. In 1861 the quarry was just one of many quarries, Ilkley Moor then a hive of activity, encompassing everything from the rearing of livestock in small holdings to lime kilns. This landscape was one of engagement, a raw material to be worked, the idea of landscape as an untouchable panorama which one viewed and passed through leaving everything as it was, still way in the future. But, beneath the surface, Nature as the ultimate exhibit was gaining ground.

Quarrying on this particular site ceased before the First World War and was then planted with mainly Sitka Spruce and, to a far lesser extent, Scots Pine. In fact Sitka Spruce had been introduced into Britain from Alaska in 1831 and would become the most widely planted of commercial conifers. Though now the Sitka Spruces give the appearance of being a green curtain to hide a once naked industrial scar, in fact the original intention had been to plant the entire moor with Sitka Spruce and which was only prevented by the good burgers of Ilkley, these canny brokers of the scenic and romantic only too well aware of the area's potential for tourism ever since Queen Victoria's visit. An Ilkley boy through and through, the buffoon Alan Titchmarsh today belongs to this opportunist bloodline that puts nature through its paces as a particularly mutable form of exchange value.

Anyhow, approaching the line of Sitka Spruce atop the quarry edge, I was delighted to witness an aerial ballet of dozens upon dozens of Green Hairstreaks jinking around the conifers. I had been captivated before by this dance around the lone Sitka Spruce at the bottom end of 'the big field' on Otley Chevin. However this present display was breathtaking and I shall never forget it for as long as I live, the 23rd of April being one of those rare days that surpassed themselves and also had such a surpassing personal effect on me, like I also had taken wing and was in the process of being reborn. I wanted this soaring experience to stay with me forever but short of a general insurrection; there is no chance of that. I had previously questioned if this was only a display of male territoriality but now I am convinced females are present in considerable numbers, having watched on a number of occasion's males furiously flapping their wings, seeking, as if imitating a hover fly, to remain stationary before a down-wind female nestling deeper within the pine needles. Clumsily suspended for 10 seconds at the most, as if the butterfly was not really cut out to execute such an action, I have yet to witness this behavior on bilberry covered terrain and which must be done in the expectation the release of pheromones will make the female receptive. It is possible the difference between the supple bilberry leaf and spiky conifer leaf is the cause of this specific behaviour, the former far more likely to tear a butterfly's wing should the male risk diving in deeper for a closer inspection. If so, this 'aberrant' behavior may well have evolved in response to the introduced Sitka Spruce, for the butterfly showed scant interest in the native Scots Pine. Both sexes are strongly attracted to the conifer's flower and will often favour the flower, even as a perch, above that of the needle-like leaves. I even snapped off a fruiting head of nature's candy stick, finding the taste to my likening. Like butterfly, like man. And in that order now, if Homo sapiens is not to prematurely become the last of the hominid fossils!

On Ilkley Moor B'tat..

Above: Green Hairstreak on Sitka Spruce / Above: White Wells and Darwin's Escape

I was also amazed I was the first to witness this inspiring aerial ballet. How come the legions of Wharfedale naturalists had not noticed it before me? How come, how come? And then the thought occurred to me: 'Darwin's quarry' is not accessible by car. I had my answer: no car, no nature, the car logic of well healed naturalists rendering the empirical existence of butterflies superfluous, if they can't be viewed within a few short steps from a car park. Car centrist Berkleyism is a guiding precept of nature-reserves, Bishop Berkely maintaining material objects only exist through being perceived.

These observations to one side, I have over the years become progressively more interested in the history of West Yorks quarrying and regret the fact no comprehensive work has been done on the industry from its demise to 'revival', for impressed in quarried stone is a record of capitalist transformation. This process of creeping industrial fossilization, then geopolitical rebirth far overseas, has been ignored for too long, neither Marx, nor Engels having anything to say on the subject though John Ruskin, when he came to Bradford, could see nothing but stone whilst insensible to the textile workers whose exploitation had made Bradford the boom city of the 19th century. What knowledge I have has been put together from snippets gleaned from local history societies like the Halifax Antiquarian Society whose annals I consulted following the major fire on Ovenden Moor in April 2011. The fire had taken hold of the desiccated heather and peat but the former quarry sites, home to the majority of Green Hairstreaks, had been largely spared. The fire had been put out when eventually we climbed the moor, though here and there the moor would burst into flames and I was able to take footage of fugitive Green Hairstreaks against a scorched, smoking landscape, a portent of what's in store for us and not only the Green Hairstreak.

Turning the pages of a Halifax Antiquarian Society volume from the 1920s, I was fascinated to learn that in 1870 almost the entire male population of the moor were employed in "the delves", the 300 "delvers" (quarry men) reduced to 5 some 36 years later in 1906. The delvers and their families lived in tenanted houses in a remote moorland hamlet intriguingly called Fly on the Cold Edge Road, a vernacular name inscribed by the elements and poles apart from today's numbing bureaucratic names reeking of the deathly conformity of council chambers and the board rooms of real estate companies.

I had intended to search out what remained of the foundations of this former quarrying community and its sole public building, The Delvers Arms (and just up from where the Angry Brigade tried out a machine gun) to see how quickly nature had done its job of reclamation and if it was more bio-diverse than the surrounding waste. Eager to find out more about quarrying and mining in the area, I was surprised to learn that a condition of lease in 1776 in the Halifax district required that coal workings be filled in when discontinued and "made safe for cattle". However these early attempts at land restoration were trifling compared with the scale of today's ruinous makeovers and we find that "on the heights of soil hills scores of depressions in the surface may be seen now forming little ponds". Deemed to constitute a major health hazard, this would never be tolerated today. And if any of these ponds contained the Great Crested Newt, well, they would be translocated - most likely to die an artistic, hygienic death in the interests of "health and safety".

Tramping around the urban and country areas of West Yorks I have for years increasingly marveled at the many kinds of differently shaped stones and their tooled markings and surfaces devised by masons that were not, I would like to believe, made to order but rather demonstrated a small, but meaningful, measure of choice and workers' control over the trade. So I was pleased at last to learn the taxonomic stock in trade of masonry, like plain boosting (irregular chisel marks) and clean boosting, meaning the chisel marks are uniform. Iron stained stones were rejected and termed "red insiders" for they would go to make up interior walls which would be hidden by a coating of lime plaster. But come the 1950s and derelict quarries would start to be raked over for iron marked red stone. However this self conscious naturalism was then still a minority tendency, at odds with the worshipful science of new materials which, like the utopian cult of concrete, would deliver us into a post scarcity world of commodity abundance, just as Le Corbusier's "beton bruit" combined with mass car ownership, promised to do.

I learnt too that a "pitch faced stone" was a slab whose edges had been cut straight and the face left rough (i.e. "riven" - a term readily familiar to me) ) like the famous Elland flags that were quarried primarily for cutting and squaring into landings though particularly paving stones that have proved extraordinarily durable. And I too began to notice how, over the past few years, concrete paving began to be replaced with stone, flags heavily marked with iron solution, and given the name of leisegang rings, now at a premium. This was greenwash or rather stonewash, code for sustainability and the fact that capitalism now cared. I noticed too how easily they cracked and shortly I was to find out why through actually cutting the stone.

Delivered in crates containing metre square slabs and machine cut to only 22mm and grooved on the back like tiles, they come in 1000s of vast container ships all the way from immense quarries in Rajasthan in India to quench a thirst for authenticity in consumer capitalism that can not be slaked by being turned into stone. The Elland flags had been split by hand along the bedding plate with a cold chisel and to avoid cracking had to be double that. The question where is all this stone coming from lay half formed in my mind, for in the UK there are only 1,300 small working quarries with, for example, the quarrying of magnesium limestone banned, except for restoration purposes such as repairing the weathered façade of York Minister.

Above: New London paving from the Rajasthan Stone Syndicate. / Above: Old cobblestones, Bradford. / Above: Unofficial nature (birds foot trefoil) and stone setts, Bradford

By far the biggest trend in geology in this country and how best it sells itself to the public is geo-conservation with about one third of sites of special scientific interest (SSSI) geo-science based, with an estimated 3,500 local geological sites. The quarrying industry hides behind this surface layer. The trade association for quarrying never gives pride of place to the scale of its member's extractive activity. Rather it will headline webs with facts like one third of SSSI sites are old quarries for invertebrate diversity. There is even now an attempt, in response to DEFRA's (Dept for Environment, Food, & Rural Affairs) recent endeavor to put a price on nature, to do the same for geo-conservation by subtly modifying what we mean by the value of a raw material so that what really counts is its aesthetic value, not its vulgar monetary value as bawled out on the floor of a commodities exchange. There is something eerily Wordsworthian about the claim of the emerging UK Geo-diversity Action Plan that "nature is not just about living things - its mountains and minerals too", and that "we value our metal alloys, our gold, silver, platinum and our gemstones." The overriding emphasis here is on sheen, even mineral science and metallurgy, but not exchange value, as if to say only through the aesthetic, and knowledge for its own sake, is capitalism made palatable. Now contrast this with the raw commercialism of the Rajasthan Stone Syndicate, which was set up in 1992. As the major player in the India Stonemart "the largest exposition of the stone industry" in the world, and whose principal sponsor is the Rajasthan State Industrial Development Investment Corporation, the syndicate shamelessly proclaims that is has "acquired the benchmark of exporting 1000s of containers worldwide." No reveling either in that guilty word "sustainability" which, as regards quarrying and mining, usually means the safe disposal of hazardous waste and ensuring that heavy metals do not leach into local water supplies. There was a more sensitive issue to air, the better to hide from view: immediately beneath the trumpeted business success of the Rajasthan Stone Syndicate we read that it is an ethical business (what else!) and "does not indulge in child labour". In a country with between 60 and 112 million child labourers this has to be a sick joke.

By the time these facts came to light, we were already half way through facing a flight of steps leading down to a basement flat in Notting Hill, London. The original steps appeared to have been constructed from limestone and which must have looked outstanding when completed around 130 years ago but would soon erode because of acid rain and damp generally. We suggested replacing the steps with a steel staircase but since the street was in a conservation area, this was out of the question. Repeated attempts to repair the steps having failed, we thought the only solution was to face the treads and risers with York stone. This was bound to be expensive but not as expensive as demolishing the existing steps and redoing them in concrete and which would have the added disadvantage of making access to the basement flat all but impossible for as long as it took to shutter the steps and for the concrete to cure. And so we made the rounds of local building merchants eventually ending up at Keylines, by far the biggest supplier of heavy-duty building materials in the country. And it was in Keylines yard that we first set our eyes on Indian stone. But it was sometime later, and only after flicking through a Marshall's product brochure, that I began to get an inkling of the size of this stone transshipping operation which easily eclipses that of the pharaohs. And this immediately answered my question why, of late, the pedestrian precincts of prestigious buildings, town halls and salubrious neighborhoods were increasingly paved with the new gold -'York' stone?

We exchanged knowing looks when we found out that meter sq blocks of riven stone 22mm thick were retailing at a snip of the cost of "locally sourced" York stone. Cheap Indian labour was our immediate verdict. Even so I had only a hazy notion that the horrific labour conditions in the mines of the 1830s I had been reading about in the annals of the Halifax Antiquarian Society were being reproduced on a far bigger scale in today's India. It fact it was the range of hard landscaping products on offer that initially attracted my attention for I have long been outraged at the growing area of hard surface in the urban environment, London losing the equivalent of two and a half Hyde Parks of lamentable 'greenery' every year from its domestic gardens. Low maintenance, car friendly gardens in particular are the money spinning specialty of garden centres because they are relatively instantaneous, so to speak, and are assembled, a bit like the contents of a flat pack, rather than grown over a lengthy period of time, though it cannot be stressed enough that the lowest of low maintenance garden is the wildlife garden, itself a mediocre anticipation of the jungling of the city.

Above: Marshalls type of faux nature conservation

The Marshall's brochure had perfected the art of double speak. In the top right hand corner of the brochure's cover is the firm's logo, a diagrammatic representation of a crustacean shell, below which is written, in bold type, "Marshall's: transforming British landscape since 1885". In fact we should reverse the order of "the garden and driveways collection" and put the car first for the brochure targets suburbia first and foremost, cars appearing approximately 56 times in the 171 page, lavishly illustrated, catalogue. However cars are discreetly tucked away to one side, full frontals of cars conspicuous by their absence, even though in the last analysis it is the car that rules in these glossy pages. The front cover, for example, shows two young girls playing on the driveway of a large double fronted house, as if intimating a reinvention of space. To one side the flip-flop wearing, attentive mother. Little more than the bonnet of a BMW is visible, the driveway having been laid with drivesett argent, "a manufactured product which is permeable". An advocate of porous cities, the firm's unspoken aim is to increase car ownership and thus the amount of paved over, hard landscaping even though it pretends otherwise by exhorting us to reduce our carbon footprint. On the third page of the brochure we are reminded that "over forty% of CO2 emissions in the UK come from actions by individuals, so it's essential we all do our bit." But getting rid of the car altogether is the last thing Marshall's has in mind. So it is an apostolic exhortation in dread of a meaningful outcome, amounting to thus far but no further - or else!

Marshall's main aim is to reassure its key market, the aspirational suburban middle class, that it can have its cake and eat it and that to go 'green' does not mean a cut in living standards. Out to profit from the first glimmerings of a bad conscience in middle class consumers, it likes to think of itself as a consciousness raising firm that goes one better, tutoring the guilty consumer to take a look at its array of alternative products, each of which has a "carbon label" devised by the Carbon Trust and DEFRA (Dept for Environment, Food, & Rural Affairs). The firm is proud to announce that it "has been pioneering" with this scheme and "ahead of all other companies", being the first company in hard landscaping to launch a "carbon calculator" to let "you see how many trees are required to offset the carbon produced in the creation of a driveway or patio." And here we have it: carbon offset as the contemporary equivalent of the sale of indulgences that sparked the protestant revolution ("religion's self criticism in motion") against the church. Trees, of course, do lock up CO2 but in a burning world they also massively release it. Carbon offset is the dirty alternative to changing a carbon intensive life through an anti capitalist revolution; a revolution that is about the 'art' of living differently, anti aesthetic and anti commercial, against Value (in the Marxian sense of the term) and up with the unknown potentialities of human wealth once money is abolished.

To buy from Marshall's is to buy into salvation. The firm's many mission statements are a living proof of that; 'progressive' in one domain, so it must appear in all the rest. Women appear approximately 107 times in the brochure's photos, men just forty seven times (discounting the operatives seen at work assembling these unspeakable jigsaw gardens). Women are rarely shown actually gardening but men are pictured carrying trees. More often women appear as if in a still life, a soft focus wheelbarrow in the foreground, elsewhere an artfully arranged trowel or spool of gardening twine put there for effect rather than use. And when women do seem to be gardening, they are snipping flowers or carrying baskets of blooms, like straight out of a mortifying pastiche of a Renoir painting that has discreetly covered up cleavage, buttocks and all erotic appeal, for these are domesticated housewives more Stepford than dressed for power and to kill in a City of London boardroom. Otherwise women are to be seen lying around on expensive, designer garden furniture, entertaining, playing mother hen to zombie children or acting as if highly appreciative of their newly hard-landscaped surrounds. The food on display is an advertisement for healthy eating and epicurean moderation: salads, bread baskets of whole meal loaves, coffee percolators (nothing spontaneously 'instant' here), tumblers of fruit juice, the temperate intake of wine from half full, not half empty, glasses. The one folded newspaper, whose title we can read, just happens to be the Daily Telegraph.

Above: Marshalls aestheticism plus playing up to consumer addiction

This increased feminine exposure, though here indicative, at best, of a progressive conservatism, nonetheless shows the degree to which women overall are spotlighted by the market, men, in this instance, increasingly occupying a subordinate role. This gender inequity, though loading women with the most insupportable confusions and contradictions that can only lead to breakdown, means that if sale strategies are to succeed, then getting the consent of women is paramount. Who would have thought, forty years ago, that, in the 'macho' world of building, the approval of women would ever play such a directing role? This apparent 'feminization' of the market is matched by a similar, merely apparent, increase in choice.

And so it is with Marshall's where, if we are to believe the sales patter, we will be the designers of our hard garden of choice, not Marshall's who will forever remain the humble facilitators. Though we are only selecting from a product range, this range aspires to be as unfixed, and ever changing, as the clouds in the sky. But it is we; the consumers that make this happen and so make the company 'happen', like at an artistic 'event', we being the interactive audience. Each purchase from Marshall's is sold as a unique creative act. The brochure asks us to reflect on "what is your garden style?" Having come up with an individual preference, we are then compellingly told "anything is possible with Marshall's" and that, as a result, "everyone will create their garden to suit their particular tastes." This 'will' is a given, not a 'can' that is hedged with a degree of doubt. It is rather a certainty, a business guaranty we can achieve creative liberation through the market in stone. Seeming to privilege the sovereignty of our desires and owing much to anarchism, this language of empowerment actually belongs to the commodity, not us. In reality what it does underline is the increasing impoverishment of our own lives and that it is becoming ever harder to distinguish between true and false creativity, as the latter becomes overwhelmingly central to the continued functioning of the market place, indeed comes to constitute its lifeblood, what it lives and moves by. This leaves the field ever more wide open to virtual substitutes and, by flattering every customer they are really an artist, ever easier to pull the wool.

And so with Marshall's. In fact it was the names that commanded attention not the stock, suggesting an ideal inventory conjured into existence by the act of naming. It was more like dealing with a novel branch of natural science than a builder's merchant. The transforming power of taxonomic minutiae appeared to transubstantiate an unexceptional, almost indistinguishable, "riven" or manufactured series into a freshly minted geology. Though designed to give the impression of outstripping the formative human capacity for invention, this obvious fraud will only go down well in suburbia where imagination is so lacking and insight so rare, it is easy for Marshall's to sell its conservative, conservation conscious, brand of nonconformity.

A random word list of some of the things on offer says all that need be said:

"golden sand sandstone, autumn tinge sandstone, silver finestone sandstone, antique sandstone, distressed look sandstone, dark jade slate, midnight blue slate, eclipse granite, coach house paving, polesden lacey flagstones, chancery flagstones, heritage paving, weathered York stone, Calder brown, old Yorkshire, heritage octant, regent paving, rustic walling, utility paving, antique rope edge, country edging, spar aggregate, Atlantic pebbles, Atlantic cobbles , Celtic cobbles, part worn boulders, candystone rockery, mixed polished pebbles, black polished pebbles, Cotswold chippings, Staffordshire chippings, plum slate chippings, blue slate chippings, green slate chippings, Spanish white chippings, multi flit spar" etc etc.

But ever more make-believe neologisms shall never be an adequate substitute for everything that's lacking in an urban landscape - which is everything, and then some.

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Though Keylines that formerly had specialized in heavy-duty road building materials was never our building merchant of choice, we had on occasion dealt with the firm before. Keylines logo now appears on the front cover of Marshall's brochure and is the latter's principal retailing outlet. This suggests that 'hard' product is increasingly invading domestic space, the road, not the ecologically friendlier railway, now running through the middle of the house, in a manner of speaking.

We felt ignored at Keylines and that hacked us off. We weren't purchasing in bulk nor were we buying one of Marshall's set stone pieces to 'creatively' muck about with. Our order was worth piss, for all we wanted were nine metres square slabs of riven Indian sandstone. On the appointed delivery day, Keylines failed to show up, our stone given to another, more 'worthy' client. Looking back, it was not just the value of our order that had tipped the scales, but the fact that we would be measuring and cutting the stone, and therefore doing something Marshall's ready-made, "limitlessly creative" order, would regard as a threat. Their "amazing" 3D software was not programmed to deal with what we were doing. We could not 'plan' what we doing down to the last detail, for it involved much trial and error. We did not have a screen image before us that showed us how the steps would look in the end. And so we were taken almost by surprise by the finished result. Two 'throwbacks' without hard hats and hi-viz jackets, we had been 'de-professionalized' as builders.

And that is why we began to get feedback from the street. Blasts from the past, we were approachable in a way that other building outfits, penned in by ready fencing and safety rules, were not. Bottom feeding locals found it natural to stop and chat. Within hours the 'old' Notting Hill had returned. Where had all these people been all our lives? Had they just moved into the area? In fact they had been living around the corner for decades, only they had become hidden from view, every one of us who had 'kept the faith', going around like the invisible man / woman. We were still invisible but now only to the newcomers, who had taken full possession of the area in the noughties and whose presiding role models are Sam 'n' Sham (Samantha and David Cameron), though what had attracted them in the first place was the area's former freewheeling past they would vampire until there was nothing left to suck dry.

The Indian stone was delivered on a wooden pallet, which we left propped up against the railings. However this did not present a disposal problem because, within minutes, an elderly black guy asked if he could take it: he was tinkering with a car engine and the pallet was an ideal bed on which to rest it. This request transported us back to the days when Notting Hill was a hive of informal back street workshops, and which showcased, in particular, the now forgotten about engineering skills of the resident black population. Once a ubiquitous feature in many UK cities, these skills have gone with the winds of de-industrialization and, with it, a hands on frame of mind that is no longer there, and that once was a lead up to the conviction the world could be changed. Cutting into the stone with a diamond disk threw up clouds of dust: drawn by the racket and ochre billows, another black guy complimented me on my masonry skills. I soaked up his compliments. At no point did one new comer take time out to even give us a second glance. As unseen as the air, we were not even taken for granted: we were simply not there.

Above: Old York stone steps Bradford. Above: Our 'modern' steps - via Rajasthan - Notting Hill, 2011.

Above. Interior stone steps Bradford. Late 19th century mill workers' terraced house.

We were pleasantly accosted by other ghosts from the past, each visitation equally revealing. Now that the job is finished, the streets are empty once more of real people. Was this a haunting, or what? Or are real people simply lacking a focus, something they feel is theirs and able to get to grips with? We were certainly agreeably surprised by the number of potential malcontents, all awaiting an opportunity to make their presence really felt.

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These reinstated steps were for a member of a local housing coop. Housing coops often grew out of squatting, tenants granted legal, not just squatters, rights. Very much a feature of the 1970s, we had kept our distance from them, dismissing housing coop ideology as control of your own alienation. To be a member of a housing coop is to lose all privacy, this informal, liberal totalitarianism proving extremely effective in marginalizing the negative. It still angers me to recall how I was put in my place, at a maintenance meeting, because I was not an architect and therefore not entitled to pass an opinion. I was tempted to start raving about the death of architecture via the Situationists and the interlude of Constant. But I would have been met with complete incomprehension. So I bided my time and when revenge came it was sweet.

These steps had been repeatedly repaired, none of the repairs working including the recent attempt to tile them. These tiles had lifted and, in desperation, an architectural and engineer consultant had been brought in to give their professional opinion, which did not come cheap. Inspecting the steps ourselves for no money at all, we noticed wooden formers had been left in the worn down treads. Problem solved: the tiles would be bound to lift once the wood became damp and started to expand.

However the architect and engineer continued to maintain there was no wood in the step. And the management committee went along with them: they had to be right, they wouldn't be consultants otherwise. We were ordered to stop work instantly, which we took not one blind bit of notice of. This reconstitution of the division of labour from the bottom up, and deference to the status quo is central to housing coop ideology. But for us, the proper place is at the bottom of the shit heap.

When we ironically told the committee not to fret, the Indian stone was ethically sourced, almost as one they replied "that's good. We fully support ethical trading initiatives." Not a shadow of a doubt had crossed their minds that these claims might prove bogus if conscientiously investigated and that they suited Marshall's "trading initiative". Imagine the outcry if Marshall's had said in their brochure child labour keeps our prices down, which is good for you and good for Indian children because it puts bread in their mouths. It would amount to nothing less than commercial suicide. 'Ethical' investors would immediately withdraw their cash, not because they feared the sting of remorse, but they would the financial sting that would inevitably follow the chorus of disapproval. This is utilitarian ethics, which commands us to hearken to the penitential conscience of money ("conscience money") that will assuredly turn bad money into good money eventually. This is not the critique of political economy but its moralization. It is symptomatic of a troubled bourgeoisie returning to its core values, one, that under the guise of morality, not only seeks to preserve wage labour but actually extend it, getting hot under the collar at the vast amount of bonded labour (i.e. slave labour) in India alone, where it is customary for debt burdens to fall on children if a parent dies.

What is for sure, the rising demand for authentic stone increases the incidence of child labour, there being an estimated one million children doing extremely dangerous work in India's stone quarries. Marshall's claims that it works with, and funds, Hadoti Hast Sansthan, an Indian NGO that seeks to improve the lot of quarry workers and their families. NGOs define the agenda of the people they are 'helping' and never spontaneously arise from the struggle of the people. They are a symptom of the failure of genuine struggle organized from the bottom up, not top down. The Marshall's brochure displays a photo of children at an HHSS (Heritage, Horticulture, Skills Scheme) sponsored school beneath which there is one of Indian children lining up in front of a flag bearing the Marshall's name and trade mark insignia. In another, classrooms of 'branded' children are all wearing Marshall's T shirts. Revealingly, Marshall's is never named directly by organizations opposed to bonded and child labour, and which means they must fear court action. But we can be in no doubt it is Marshall's they have in mind when they mock the companies claim no kids have been anywhere near the stone they retail at bargain basement prices. The crux of their objections, (and it's a compelling one), is that Marshall's, and firms like them, cannot hope to monitor and control the supply chain, given the well organized, very powerful, near impenetrable nexus of quarry owners, politicians, child traffickers etc.

Above: Hypocritical aspects of Marshalls hyped brochure

The expanded reproduction of false assurances are a necessary part of capital and what goes for child labour also goes for the firm's biodiversity credentials. The brochure states that "Marshall's aims "to have a biodiversity action plans at every site by 2012", an aim which has been "inspired by the UK's first biodiversity benchmark accredited to a working site at Marshall's Maltby site [South Yorkshire] in 2007 and our Stoke Hall Quarry in 2009". (In the meantime Maltby has become a noxious open cast coal mine). It is beyond the wit of anti slavery organizations, and the like, to even question, never mind critique, these claims in the same breath it does bonded labour, though it is obvious the same contradictory criteria apply. Under the protection of a series of environmental awards environment groups are doubly keen to bestow on commerce and "which Marshall's are justifiably proud" of, what the company's is really aiming for is a planet of stone, made up of grandiose driveways, hard landscaping, paving and freeways.

Above: Marshalls further hypocritical pro-moing of conservation areas

Solely concentrating on the conditions of labour in Indian quarries, the merely reproving organizations that spring from the bad conscience of the bourgeoisie never go on to ask further questions: like, for instance, the impact of India's vast stone quarries upon the international division of labour in relation to quarrying and masonry. Researching natural stone on the internet, I came across a firm in Bingley near Bradford that was equipped with computer controlled cutting machines linked to a computer aided design department (CAD) that, in turn, had to hand "experienced stone masons working alongside state of the art technology". In comparison to the mass produced stone setts available from Marshall's, this was the real value added article. Though it couldn't hope to compete with Marshall's on price, it could 'create something unique', my piece of stone abomination, if not better than my neighbours, then at least different from theirs - and which I have paid through the nose for, in order to be a cut above them. Custom-made masonry like this involves working closely with the firm, something that is not possible if the firm happens to be in Rajasthan and even is equipped with video conferencing facilities. In contrast Marshall's has a "register of installers", though it has an overburden of staff whose job it is to advise and promote the firm. As part of its PR campaign, it has trained 50 of its staff in "Community Street auditing to provide feedback to create better street design". In the brochure there is also a photo of Marshall's employees gazing out over the Maltby nature reserve on an old pit spoil heap in South Yorkshire as if to say part of their employment contract requires they become naturalists and not just mere wage slaves.

"Leading by example" and "balancing the economic, community and environmental", Marshall's has introduced the practice of` "payroll giving" that recalls that of the closed shop, trade union "check-off" and that frequently would be overseen by the company and acted as a further guarantor of shop floor stability. "Pay roll giving" is a substitute for that abandoned practice and helps protect the company from outside criticism and industrial conflict. A firm that presents itself as without blemish, its hands spotlessly clean, suggests it has something very dark to hide. Beyond denying they use child labour, the stone firms of Rajasthan don't pretend to be anything like as public spirited and which at least has the merit of being more truthful.

Of course quarrying firms are mechanized in India, but their main outlay is on machines that cut "sawn stone", either on one side ("riven finish") or both, the "squaring off`" still mostly manual and that gives a stone flag its tapered look we used to good effect on the steps. There is not much call for CAD (Computer Aided Design) in stone product at this stage of India's development. However I doubt if quarrying in India that is overwhelmingly geared to bulk production today bears much resemblance to quarrying in Britain in the 19th century. Then there was a hierarchy of trades going from labourers who, using picks wedges and crowbars, were under the direction of delvers who were skilled in removing stone from the various beds, to bench masons who shaped the stone, to dressers who dressed the stone to produce sills, headers and lintels. Then there were the sawyers operating sawing frames and planers who finished the stone to produce ashlar blocks. Flags for paving were cut from bedding closer than 5cms, which means that with the aid of cutting machinery available in Rajasthan; at least 5 flags could be wrested from a 5cm block, a feat that a 19th century West Yorkshire delver would have said was impossible. This really is 'value for money' and time spent getting the stone out. As basic as it gets, there is nothing fancy about Indian stone production. It is simplicity itself. What is delved from sandstone bedding blocks and comes out banded with oxidized iron that paints and dapples the surface, is all that is needed to satisfy a growing western market for a 'natural aesthetic.' Sidestepping the hassle of changing anything, least of all the capitalist mode of production, this distressed aesthetic signifies living in harmony with nature. Though particularly appealing to catastrophically discontented suburbanites still clutching death-like at neo liberal straws, this seemingly inexhaustible product of the primary circuit of industrial exploitation is increasingly the hard standing of choice for local councils throughout the UK. In fact its no-expense-spared look is a cheap form of pump priming, flagging up flagging property values with stone flags.

We have more or less come full circle and I am once more sitting in the Halifax public library, mindful this was where a pre situationist Ralph Rumney read De Sade in the presence of a clergyman. Only this time I was searching out information on how the moors of West Yorkshire had once been worked on an industrial scale, though nothing like the rocky landscapes of Rajasthan. There is nothing pristine about these 'wild' moorlands and I knew for a fact the delves and mounds of detritus left by former industrial workings had aided the incoming Green Hairstreak butterfly and that without them the colonization of the moors by them would not have happened to the extent it has done. These industrial tumuli, for the most part, did not appear on maps, and so what we were engaged on was a task of discovery, each day that we set out for these moorlands an adventure. We came to know these moors in a deep sense. A process that goes to the depths, it intimated at a new way of living. Not least, it meant treating nature not as a discrete object but something we are involved with, and change in the process. Only from this standpoint, can we begin to retrieve what's relevant from the overall gobbledygook of Hegel's Philosophy of Nature that aspires to replace god with dialectics, or rather makes god into dialectics and thus the driving force behind all there is. Our wanderings also bore a clear link to the now threadbare practice of the derive, only this time it was man and nature, not a sundering of the two as formerly was largely the case. However this perception crept upon us unawares. When we initially ventured out, we deliberately chose to do so in the customary manner of 17th/18th/19th century naturalists. We were going to walk.

Researching the index of the Halifax Antiquarian Society led me on from quarrying to mining. And that's how I serendipitously came across entries specifically dealing with the appalling conditions in the mines around Halifax in the 1830s and which led to the setting up of a Children's Employment Commission in 1842 , specifically charged with dealing with mines. The government inspectors employed on these commissions, like Inspector Scriven who came to Halifax, uncommonly could not be silenced or bought off and won the admiration of Marx. My attention was caught by the indiscriminate mixing of boys and girls "all naked except their shifts and shirts" and in the dark "impossible to distinguish their sexes, girls from 5 to 18 performing all the works of boys". Inspector Scriven concluded, "It is impossible to distinguish an atom of difference between one sex and another". A journey of inquiry that had started out from the Green Hairstreak had ended on the industrially androgynous. I wanted to throw these eye-opening revelations in the face of the librarian who clearly hated me simply because I was male, and who would not want to know how the history of capitalism is also that of the incomplete disordering of gender. (I dread to think what she would have thought of me if I had asked for a volume of De Sade!)

I was days away from the notes I took becoming immediately relevant. Indian stone did that. It came as a shock to realize that the conditions described in the Children's Employment Commission of 1842 where being reproduced on a bigger scale than ever before. I was staggered to learn how, in the 1830s, 3 year old daughters of colliers would be employed to hold candles whilst their father hewed the coal. And here I was reading about how young girls, not yet in their teens, are today employed by their parents to break hard stone into pebbles the size of walnuts, and which seem destined for India's enormous road building program, India's largely pre-concrete road system still dependent upon compression under the wheels of the many non-motorized vehicles for consolidation. We are disinterestedly told the labour of children in India's quarries "supplement the earnings of their parents". The unbearable reality is that, in the 1830s, colliers often lived off the earnings of pauper apprentices who would inevitably runaway and doss in old industrial workings, eating chucked candles for food. And given the amount of child trafficking in India, it is more than probable the same applies in India today. However, the size of India's quarrying sector suggests an altogether greater control by capital than would be the case in 1830s' West Yorkshire. And with this greater control comes power over the money in circulation, there being less opportunity than previously for the aspiring worker entrepreneur to get his greedy mitts on some of the blood money.

I am spending more and more time in Bradford, Richard Oastler's (1789-1861) adopted city. He was the first to legislate into being childhood for the industrial poor beginning with the 1847 Factory Act that restricted children to a 10 hour day in the cotton mills. Now that left a lot of playtime, but Oastler, to his everlasting credit, had gone to jail, the price he was to pay for urging workers to strike and sabotage machinery. There is a statute to him and a shopping mall named after him in Bradford. This city in which East meets West and is no stranger to uprisings, is supremely well placed to bring to peoples' notice the geopolitical division of the world into industrial and finance capital and how we walk all over the consequences of that division every time we set foot in the City Centre. So why not use Oastler's statute as a starting point? It is important that we don't get sidetracked by the emotive issue of child labour and get bogged down in a highly moral, partial protest like UK Uncut does, and that is the darling of the dissenting English middle classes but which unfailingly turns its back on a thoroughgoing critique of political economy.

Above left: Richard Oastler saving a pigeon. Above right: child labour and industrial androgyny in early 19th century Bradford.

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In fact we had just returned from Bradford, where we had been engaged in a mammoth conservation project of our own choosing. Though another story, it is linked with our experiences around facing the steps in one vital respect - the amount of attention we attracted, some far from welcome where it involved the police and security. Turning over and seeding industrially derelict sites along a four km stretch along the valley floor from Shipley right into the heart of Bradford, we were approached, on numerous occasions, by curious people. Every chance encounter sparked, excepting that of security and the police, though even here the run-in (certainly not encounter, which implies dialogue) tended to blow up in their maggot eaten faces. The most memorable encounter came one Sunday morning. A real bruiser, dressed in army fatigues, came up to us, like he was spoiling for a fight. When we explained to him what we were doing, he raised his fist and said "up with the revolution". He had got it in one. He had just been released from prison that morning. Not one bantering exchange, whilst working on the steps, cut through to the essential like this one did. Crystallizing everyone's hopes, not just ours, it had to spring from the nature of what we were doing.

We do not for one moment doubt that what we are engaged in Bradford is of far greater consequence than the building work we do, even though the tools we were using are much the same, in particular saws and shovels. Perhaps it was the age old, unchanging nature of the tools that was a factor in loosening people's tongues and helped put them at ease. Constrained by capitalism on every side, building awaits its realization. But what we do for nature now is wholly positive and cannot wait: and I do mean we, the people, and not official conservation bodies, whose job it is to bury nature under the ruse of resurrecting it. Lacking even a soft critique of capitalism that can be the only possible outcome.

These reflections close on a dialectical twist. What we are doing for butterflies (and others including human kind) in Bradford easily has more to with the built environment than any building we are currently occupied on. Not least, we are mounting a challenge to land banks, daring them to arrest us so we can censure the practice of sterilizing derelict land for years on end, in the expectation of making a killing that grows ever more remote. The first failed city of note in Britain, Bradford stands at a cross roads, its reinvention as a post industrial leisure city driven by retailing and property values having been swallowed whole by the enormous pit at the city's heart. Already feeble attempts are being made to green it. The point is to wild this "best among ruins", to coax into being what's already struggling to take wing, our immediate aim is to bring the Common Blue into the city centre, a project just starting to get airborne. But this history belongs elsewhere...........

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Further Notes. 2012

Above: An amazing Budd Wall in Shibden Dale, West Yorks

Below, Stone Cryptogram on St Georges Hall, Bradford built during the Chartist agitation in the city

The mute stones of West Yorkshire have an extraordinary tale to tell. But it is an overlooked history, barely meriting a footnote when compared to the woollen industry which it accompanies at every step. The years 1780 to 1840 see a vast increase in the quarrying and use of stone going from the numbers of individual weavers cottages constructed, to communal loom chambers with weavers cottages in rows and squares as master clothiers took control of the trade. Finally there comes the rapid growth of factories and towns in the valley bottoms with workers' houses squeezed in amongst the factories. Meantime there is a great advance in the amount of land enclosed and, with it, the construction of dry stone walls, boundary posts, gate posts etc. each stage marks an increase in the division of labour as the activities of quarrying, fettling, preparation and stone masonry are increasingly 'rationalized' and separated out and as capital becomes ever more concentrated in fewer hands. This unprecedented extraction of stone tests the limits of the material itself and the ingenuity of stone masons, Calderdale in particular being especially innovative due to the steep sided valleys and the need to build on the precipitous slopes. Calderdale stones have a signature - one is tempted to say a mystery - all of their own. It is essentially unhoused stone, as if it was straining against the uses to which it has been put and alone privy to the real meaning of Jacob's stone pillar and ladder.

Quarrying and stone masonry in West Yorkshire has never been systematically investigated and all there is to go on are occasional articles in the annals of local history societies and snippets from pamphlets put out by tourist boards like the Heritage Pennine Network- and then largely focussed on the earlier stages of the woollen industry located, as it was, in the sylvan valleys of West Yorkshire - mainly in the shape of farm houses (laithehouses) multi storied weavers cottages built from local stone, these stop-off points form part of dedicated tourist trails, a controlled perambulation with the sole intention of boosting revenues from the tourist trade. History for the sake of history, the last thing tourist historicism wants is a creative re-engagement with the past with a view to seizing the present.

I largely became aware of the stones of West Yorkshire as if in a fog. Disused quarries and heaps of spoil over time had become wild life havens and formed a constant background to our researches on butterflies in West Yorkshire. Might not the towns and cities eventually partake of these riches? And so the notion of the wilding of cities was born. Creeping upon us gradually the intractable crash of 2007-8, combined with the onset of major climate change, gave it the urgency it had previously lacked. As shop after shop closed, the town centres of West Yorkshire seemed to shudder as if the flood waters of apocalypse were upon them. As the death sentence of consumerism was pronounced, the buildings that composed them became increasingly emptied of meaning and the stones began to speak in a new way as if inviting reuse and reinvention. This disordering of the senses, this splitting of ordinary vision verging on madness and disrupting the continuities of past, present and future are signposts to a very different reality as yet to be constructed. This disorientation / reorientation is increasingly commonplace as the old tried and tested responses to capitalist social and economic crises fail as never before. Townscapes especially become scenes of deranged visual commotion and individual stones would stand out like they alone possessed unshakable meaning. And it was in this frame of 'mind', of unnerving double-vision with a foot in two worlds, that I first noticed a decorative stone just above pavement level on the Leeds Road front of St Georges Hall in Bradford (see above photo). I had passed it countless times before but only now did I see it was a cryptogram in gritstone encoding some type of message. This hall had been built at the height of the Chartist agitation and Bradford was in a state of real, not merely visual, flux with dual power reigning in much of the nascent city, the iron foundry of Low Moor, for example, turned over ('redirected') to the making of arms for the revolution. Perhaps the encryption is innocent. But perhaps not and what appears to be a cathedral and numbers evolving out of hieratic foliage, a critique in stone that might have appealed to Ruskin had he seen it on the two occasions he visited Bradford, for it signifies a degree of individual, on the job, autonomy denied to the industrial working class but an everyday reality to a stone mason.

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Above left: The One Eyed Cat. Above right: Leaf Mask stone. High Sunderland Hall, Halifax.

I have no idea where this cat's head came from in West Yorkshire but its angular shape suggests it was once was the keystone of an arch. However, presiding over the entrance to what? A barn, a house or a laithehouse which combined both living space and barn under one roof? and it is not the work of a skilled stone mason rather the product of a quarryman turning his hand to stone carving and who would not regard it as art, or even craft for that matter, but as living, something in the stone itself which he revealed by peeling away the layers. Such an approach is Romano-British in origin and goes back to the Roman Conquest when local tribes began to imitate the Roman practice of carving representational heads in stone instead of using the skulls of dead animals. However the aim was very different and meant to evoke a presence, the very idea of taking a step back to admire the sculpted form, an aesthetic recoil utterly alien to the Ancient Brits. It would take centuries to inculcate the practice to the point where it became habitual and therefore a fact of 'nature'.

There is a small head on a 17th century farmhouse in Calderdale that is so unobtrusive people pass by without noticing it. Of course these heads that look out and shy away from being looked at, invariably underwrite a strong ancestral link to the land, the farmstead passing from one generation of a family to another. The heads are not about show any more than the farmsteads are and rather emphasize endurance, unchangingness and the persistence of custom. Now contrast this with the Ozymandian, look-at-me arrogance of the carvings that command the entrance to a 19th century mill in Bradford where myth and allegory wreathe the mug of the now long forgotten owner and dereliction stretches way into the distance. Only a shell of stone now remains - and decomposing signs advertising the building is for sale or ripe for conversion into luxury flats or industrial and commercial units. The offers will never be taken up but the longer they stand empty the more it feeds the appetite to occupy and transform - if only in a narrowly utilitarian fashion to relieve a housing shortage but with a promise of free form building to come.

Though the 19th century was the heyday of the West Yorkshire stone mason in terms of numbers employed in the trade, skill in execution and emptiness of content, it was already being fatally undermined by a range of industrial techniques from jacquard type templates to mechanically operated stone saws. When John Ruskin visited Bradford around 1871, it was against the background of a masons' strike and the dilution of formerly skilled work brought on by the introduction of stone cutting machinery. As a result there was no longer a workforce with the necessary manual skills able to even marginally imbue with renewed life "the nature of gothic" in his Stones of Venice, Bradford, of all industrial cities, the most promising modern surrogate in Ruskin's eyes because it was hewn out of stone and therefore bound to possess something like the necessary skills base, and there was also a canal more fetid than anything in Venice which mesmerized Ruskin, for it was the living embodiment of hell, the contents of this devil's ink horn periodically bursting into flames.

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Below: Gravestones

Above: Tombstone roof tile Heptonstall in Calderdale. / Above: Tombstone railway embankment near Leeds City Station. / Above: Tombstone paving.

Gravestones are everywhere in West Yorkshire, a constant reminder of the availability of Yorkshire stone. It rained stone - and it also meant the less well off could afford a head stone, unlike in other districts where stone was at a premium and where a carved headstone was a synonym of wealth. Their ubiquity casts pallor of death over West Yorks, especially as overtime they have become blackened with soot, the dun of hell stained in parts with a green slime as if the decomposing contents of the grave beneath had percolated upwards. Such is their number they have, in many instances, lost their sanctity and are irreverently displaced and made to serve other purposes - for example as a tile on a porch roof of a church in Heptonstall in Calderdale and which amounts to saying the church also now believes god is dead! They can also function as ballast, a displaced graveyard on a railway embankment in Leeds city centre also an additional reinforcement against land slip.

Gravestones are also an indicator of literacy - and a protest in these parts against Royalist ostentation. As such they hark back to the ideals of the English Civil War of the 1640s. Following the restoration, the decoration of houses declines somewhat, elaborate carvings judged a form of monarchical apostasy. At the same time gravestones become more personalized, the common practice of putting the name of the deceased on a tombstone emerging only in the 17th century. They become, in addition, a substitute vehicle upon which masons can show off their skill, there being a big increase in trompe l'oeil effects and intricate floral and abstract scroll work. Tombstones were, if you like, sealed books in stone that could never be opened, for they hid a great, unmentionable secret that goes back to the civil war. Could this be the reason why a line in Meg Merrilies, written by John Keats in Scotland in 1818, had stuck in my mind? Meg lives for herself alone "upon the Moors", having no house or occupation other than what she has chosen, simply giving away, not even bartering the mats she weaves. A life of ideal freedom, "her book [is] a churchyard tomb". Walking to Kirkcudbright after having composed the ballad, Keats sees a promise of something else in poverty: the bare feet of the girls they passed display the "beauty of the human foot that had grown without unnatural restraint".

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Hugh Miller (1802-1859) Stone Mason, Scriptural geologist, Suicide

In an engraving, Miller is standing by a headstone, mallet in one hand, cold chisel in the other. It could well have been the last headstone he ever carved-that for his dead daughter. Hugh Miller, the quarry man and the insights that came from being a peripatetic stone mason have been largely ignored and what has come down to us is the safe stereotype of the scriptural geologist "holding a bible in one hand and a fossil fish in the other", adroitly reconciling the antithetical claims of science and religion. His extraordinary suicide was interpreted as a warning not to get involved in the nascent, Manfred-like, discipline of geology, for that way unbearable guilt for doing unspeakably wrong lay (e.g. Byron`s poem Manfred is set in a mountain fastness at the very moment upheavals in the earth's crust are just beginning to be understood).

And indeed there is something 'romantic' about Miller's suicide, dream and reality becoming dangerously confused and eventually turning into a nightmare which there is no awakening from. Yet it is this blurring of dream and reality that make his descriptions of rocks fossils and landscapes so captivating, like he had entered another, crystalline, world, a god sphere. He spoke of himself, like the shepherd Endymion, of "dreaming abroad when awake" and visiting a quarry he finds "a richer scene of wonder than I could have fancied in my dreams". Contrary to conventional opinion, reality here compensates for what is lacking in the dream and there is something almost 'symbolist' about his descriptions of what actually is. He describes how he climbed a cliff face passing "from ledge to ledge like the traveler of the tale through the city of statues". This image could easily have found a place in one of Rimbaud`s Villes. Having failed as a poet, composing a book of verse whilst a quarryman, (Ploughman Burns was the obvious role model), Miller mines a richer vein, opting to describe things as they are and which implies a rejection of the poetic imagination as then conceived: "I found my imagination paralyzed by an assemblage of wonders that seemed to out rival the fantastic and the extravagant even its wildest conceptions". Conscious of how words fail, he even undergoes a crises of expression that anticipates Mallarmé's claiming he "couldn't put two thoughts together".

No other geologist before or since has undergone the same gamut of emotions, crossed the frontiers of so many 'trade' demarcations only to finally founder as did Hugh Miller. For this reason, and leaving aside his failed efforts to reconcile science and religion, he remains the most hip, the most contemporary of all geologists even in his reaction and, most especially, because of his anticipatory surrealist madness.

Miller fascinates because his life encompasses so many different fields. It is of incomparably greater interest than his 'professional' contemporaries like Hutton, Lyell, Buckland and Agassiz. I have italicized professional because when Miller practiced his several trades that of geology was only just beginning to be recognized. He adopts a personal, even autobiographical style of writing that markedly contrasts with the cool detachment of his gentlemanly peers. He is passionately involved, completely lost, in his subject and vivid details of what it was like to be a journeyman stone mason spontaneously appears in his texts. Describing the squalid conditions of bothy accommodation, he relates how a laird deliberately left a hovel unrefurbished for "occasional droves of pigs or a squad of masons". He should have been a radical worker, a more scientifically inclined Burns with the beginnings of a radical critique of poetry. Unbelievably he was not and remained unsympathetic to Chartism and trade unionism whilst denouncing the conditions that brought them about. His most famous book, The Old Red Sandstone of 1842, pitches into a denunciation of Chartism in the fourth sentence of the opening page, counseling young workers not to attend Chartist meetings and not to upset the class structure which will only result "in a second Cromwell or Napoleon at their head"!

A final note on the madness of Hugh Miller: Like other geologists who began as believers, he was convinced the record of the rocks would provide proof of god's existence. However he ended up doubting the earth was created in 7 days and instead proposed that in biblical terms a day could last millions of years, having its origin in the first half of the 19th century, today's creationists regularly incant the same piece of sophistry. Miller viewed "strata as making up the geologist's book, the layers pages we may turn over, these wonderful leaves one after the other like the leaves of a herbarium - though the leaves of this interesting volume are of deep black". So, once more, we are back with the image of the book which the tombstone was a homolog of to the stonemasons of Calderdale - only this time it held in its pages an unpalatable truth and that if we are to experience heaven it is up to us to construct it, for it exists nowhere else. The stonemasons of Calderdale subcutaneously picked up on this vibe coming from the civil war of the 1640s whereas Miller did not, the betrayal of his hopes helping send him mad. And so his eye grew dim, the contours of self that had formerly wrapped itself around the "assemblage of wonders" become constricted by primeval demons as the fossil record told another story wholly incompatible with that of the Creation. He left an extraordinary suicide note that began, "My brain burns. I must have walked; and a fearful dream rises upon me. I cannot bear the horrible thought".

If the ignored stones of Bradford are to live again as part of the wilding of the city we must reconnect with the history of stone and re-imagine its psychological importance if we are to rebuild from the bottom up for the first time ever. The above potted histories, particularly that of the tombstone and Hugh Miller, are a beginning.........

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Above: Fossil in a stone wall Above: Disordered graves

Comments on the Rocks and Stones of Huddersfield by the Huddersfield Geology Group 1998.

The above photo on the left is taken from a pamphlet put out by the Huddersfield Geology Group in 1998. The 20 excellent colour photos are all descriptive and for that reason would never end up as picture post cards (even though they have had their day, excepting the few dull examples that still can be found in tourist information offices). The booklet casts an inquiring gaze over a local landscape and is exemplary on that account alone. This, despite its limitations, is citizen science at its best. At the same time it avoids the question of a re-engagement with the landscape, a question that has become burningly relevant in the 14 years that have passed since its publication. The fact that it fails to happen has more to do with the situation of generalized lock down we now find ourselves in, than with mind control.

The fact that it has been put together by 'amateurs' (to use that most condescending of terms) is evident from the way it deals with matters that professional geologists have no time for, as their discipline becomes ever more specialized - and 'irrelevant' we might also add. In the mid 19th century, geology was gripping stuff in more ways than one, responsible for putting religion on the rack, acute psychological breakdown, mesmerizing fascination as fossilized life forms, surpassing the Homeric imagination, came to light - and finally raising searching questions on the why of class division, especially when a mere stonemason like Miller was able to hold his own with "the gentleman of fortune" and still bring something to the subject they could not: actual muscle. "The working man", he wrote, "enjoys better opportunities for arriving at just decisions". That the working person gets the better part of the bargain has a Marxist even Hegelian ring to it. A couple of decades earlier, an industrial surveyor and self taught geologist, Strata Smith, (and how much he learnt on the job from canal navies, miners etc is anyone's guess) had regretted that the "theory of geology was in possession of one class of men, the practice in another."

The Rocks and Stones of Huddersfield is, in part, a riposte to this growing division of labour, devoting several paragraphs to explaining who was responsible for quarrying the rock in the first place, (delvers and the less skilled labourers they directed), and the graded hierarchy of masons who worked the stone -pitchers, fettlers, finishers, planers, sawyers, up to highly skilled dressers. But this is a far as it goes, there being no mention of strikes, internecine trade demarcation disputes etc. Given the numbers employed in the industry, Chartism must have exercised a huge influence. Yet we know next to nothing on that score. The authors, in short, stop the stones from really speaking and dancing to the Orpheus of revolution. Had they done so, the offer of financial help from Kirklees Environmental Initiative, the Curry Fund of the Geologists Association etc would have been instantly withdrawn.

And so we see as through a glass darkly. The same can be said of the two photos reproduced above. They are 'aware' photos. The stone out of which the gate post at Hichcliffe Mill is fashioned has scarce been touched by pitchers, as if they had broken off in the middle of what they were doing, leaving the job half finished. The tooled surface has a similar desultory look to it, like the dresser couldn't be arsed either. And yet it is beautiful, 'chosen' by us because of the legacy of avant-garde art. And it matters greatly it is not in a museum and still in use, to judge from the wrought iron gate still hanging from it. Though originally produced as commodities, the in situ gate post and wrought iron gate owe their delight to not yet having ascended to the top of the commodity hierarchy and becoming artistic commodities.

A knowing eye looking at the photo of old bricks taken in strong sunlight would immediately be reminded of Carl Andre's 1970s brick installation, which can be said to have founded the archly reactionary, post modern craze, for installation. We rather think the photographer was playing on this association but would never be candid enough to admit it-at least not in this booklet, for it would have thrown wide open it its restricted purview just as any mention of capitalism and class struggle was likely to do. Carl Andre's piece caused me to shut my eyes, this photo to open them. Whenever I see old bricks poking out of piles of rubble in West Yorkshire, I am now tempted to take a look, a habit which is pretty much down to this one photo - and the accompanying text to do with the local ganister and fire clays. I marvel at the varieties of bricks, their colouring, texture, lettering and reflect how dull and homogeneous the standardized bricks of today are in comparison.

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Above: Two different Mayan like gates in Shipley West Yorks

Above: Old and newish Gate posts in Eccleshill / Above: Stone conscious art heritage with -out of sight - 4 wheel drive, Queensbury, West Yorks

Above: Stone Crop and Herb Robert growing on York stone roof tiles Above: Riven stone slab garden wall, Gt Horton, Bradford
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West Yorkshire, including Bradford, was rich in prime building stone -paving, walling, roofing, the latter stone tiles called thacks from which comes the expression "working like a thacker" and whose original meaning is lost on those who tend to use it the most. It is most commonly encountered in former coal mining areas, which says something and suggests mining, quarrying and building were once closely allied. Having only ever replaced slate tiles, I cannot begin to understand, from my own experience, why thacking was such an arduous occupation. Heavy, yes, difficult yes, especially the fixing of the stone tile to the rafters. But the most unremitting job of all? On the very rare occasions I see an old roof being tiled in stone, I am always tempted to shout up to the roofers and ask "How's it going"? Invariably covered in soot, they are never the picture of happiness and I would, in all likelihood, be thought a pratt for daring to ask.

Formerly, pure stone was the most valued and the oxidized stone cast to one side as inferior, to be used as 'red insiders' on inside walls in the houses of the well to do, prestigious factory headquarters, civic buildings etc where they would be covered with lime based plaster. But in old farm buildings, rural dwellings, the gable ends of terraced houses (like in the photos reproduced here) stone was stone and mattered little how it looked and whether the colour remained uniform throughout. By a species of inversion typical of commodity society, this motley effect is now the most prized and commands a higher real estate value than does the mass manufactured look of the builders plan. However the opposite was once the case not that long ago, this process essentially beginning with the discontinuance of large scale quarrying and the post war looting of piles of unwanted disjecta strewing quarry floors for garden walls, crazy paving etc. This re-evaluation begins with an aggressively suburban, and necessarily peripheral, do it-yourself approach to building that ignores the larger, more urgent, question of architecture and urbanism in toto that became uppermost from the mid 1950s.

Fact: the 1854 ordinance survey maps show hundreds of sandstone and flag quarries around Huddersfield alone, their number possibly amounting to thousands when West Yorkshire is viewed as a whole. Fact: 1,300 quarries in the UK produce £3bn of products every year. Fact: one third of SSSI sites are old quarries for invertebrate biodiversity. Fact: One third of 7000 Sites of Special Scientific Interest are geoscience based.

Above left: "Red Insiders" in Bradford. Above far right: Red Insiders on which is superimposed a chimney in Eccleshill, Bradford

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The conservation of sites of geological significance is a late comer to the conservation scene. There is now a UK geo-conservation commission, the UK having over 3,500 local geological sites and an emerging national UK geo diversity action plan. The commission argues correctly "nature is not just about living things - its mountains and minerals too." and that without soil, hydrology, lithography, diversity of altitude, there would be no biodiversity. To raise public awareness and broaden its appeal, the chair, taking his cue from the shameful legacy of the monetization of biodiversity, (and that goes right back to its founder E.O. Wilson), immediately monetizes conservationist geoscience. "We value" the chair says "our metal, alloys, our gold, silver, platinum and our gemstones." This was in June 2011, four years into possibly the biggest, most intractable, economic crises capitalism has ever faced. There is no first person plural here, only a 'they and we are heartily sick of accountancy terms like "natural capital" rather than nature, of "eco system services" rather than natural processes and studies called "the economics of eco systems and biodiversity" - TEEB -which was the acronym given in 2007 to a team of economists and bankers to do the same for nature what Lord Stern did for climate change title. (In the age of amnesia now become Alzheimer's, who now remembers Lord Stern's 'notorious' indictment of climate change as "the greatest, most wide ranging market failure ever"?) With everything still apparently hunky dory in the market place, Stern's deification of market values is, at least, understandable even though moronic. Today it is the madness of all madness. One hears little of market solutions (or any official solution, come to that) to the burning question of climate change nowadays, even though the effects of climate change are daily more evident. But not so the determination to draw up a ledger of natures economic values covering entire eco systems, which are still little understood in terms of the connectedness (and hence real 'value') of each part to the whole. The whole of nature must now go under the auctioneer's manic hammer, even though securing a quick sale of the last meaningful item on the planet ends up costing the earth.

The following entries are from my diary and give some indication of what I then called, in the late 1990s, the 'gemification' of geology and fossils. Little did I know it, but they were an anticipation of things to come, though on a much bigger scale.

Extracts from a geology notebook

26th October 1998

Visited the gem and mineral fair. Though learning how to cut stone and recognize them attracts me, the craft side appalls me. There is something so trivial and petite bourgeois about it. I also hated the price tags on every item most carefully displayed in little boxes with little labels saying what kind of mineral it was and where it came from. There were also a couple of stands displaying fossils ,all neatly set off with labels saying where they came from what they were and from what geological epoch .e.g. Trilobite, Powys, 470 million years ago, Devonian. I was loathe to purchase any of them, even though I could not resist being fascinated with their age. Since when has fossil hunting become a trade to be included in a gem and mineralogical fair? Many stands displayed jewellery and precious stones and I picked up a catalogue advertising gemmological instruments.reet Sure enough the premises were in Greville St not far from the City of London. This was a hedge against inflation and commodities market territory. I noticed how expensively dressed some people were which struck me as unusual. I thought of Marx's aesthetic rejection of capitalism in The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts where "economic man" can only see the value of a stone not its beauty. I did ask the price of a piece of lapis lazuli which, when weighed, came to £28. Later on I bought a piece of rhodochrosite but because the woman on the stall boasted of her connections with Oxford University, I nicked a bit and gave it to B. Honour had been partially salvaged.

6th December 1998

Went to the amateur Geological Society's annual fair at Golders Green, west London. The admission price was 50p so 50p cheaper than for the Mineralogical and Gem Fair. The stall holders were the same, the atmosphere was generally friendlier-in fact I even talked to a stall holder from Co Durham. I had overheard one visitor saying to her that he had begun by collecting rock samples on his travels and now he wished to identify them. The stall holder replied saying that was how they got into the business. Somehow I got talking to her, mentioning the fact my great grandfather was an ironstone miner from Egremont in Cumbria. It seemed to impress her as she mentioned it to her husband. She showed me a piece of igneous iron ore from Cumbria as well as various crystals from re-opened mines in Cumbria. Their price ranged from £18 to £80, some as much as £250 to £350. She also said she and her husband had reopened an old mine in Weardale in Co Durham and the only way it was possible to descend the shaft was by a bosun chair just like at Gaping Ghyll below Ingleborough. At the moment a mini waterfall was preventing access. Obviously it can be a highly profitable hobby and there is a tendency in 'the trade' (understood in the business sense of the term) to keep locations secret - so I was rather surprised by her honesty. I remember at the gem fair I had attended at Swiss Cottage in the autumn, I had picked up a small piece of lapis lazuli and asked the price. I felt I was being judged on appearance and when the little rock fragment was weighed it came in at £30. End of story!

Even so I did notice a tendency, even amongst the amateur geologists, to 'gemmify' everything by giving all rock samples, no matter what, a polish. Even pebbles from the beach were given a semi precious look. (It is possible to purchase a little machine with a rotating drum containing carborundum stones from around £40). The same went for the typical seaside fossils like ammonites, (fossils which went extinct the same time as did dinosaurs), receiving the characteristic glossy hue of precious stones and then tastefully mounted in Perspex boxes. Made into artefacts, something was lost in the process. Their 'living' quality had gone a further fossilerous process involving art and decoration added to the original fossil. There is even a shop specializing in Jurassic fossils in the steel town of Scunthorpe, their owners no doubt plundering the famously fossil rich cliffs of Ravenscar, Whitby, Runswick Bay, Staithes,etc. I wonder how long the fossil trade will be permitted to continue. Museums i know, purchase specimens from these fairs, probably arguing but for the diligence of fossil hunters, much would be lost to posterity. But any fair exhibiting animal pelts, birdskins, butterflies and moths or pressed wild flowers would be quickly closed down even though there maybe no definite legal interdiction against it (excepting of course listed species). At the car boot sale I go to on a Sunday there was stall that regularly sold little glass cases of butterflies and moths-dead stock pinned down either singularly or in twos and threes. Last Christmas they were even advertised as novel Christmas presents! But that was the last time I saw the stall and maybe he was asked to shut up shop and go.

In fact the amateur geological society had something of the scrum of the car boot sale and something of a church bring and buy about it. Apart from glossy nature books for children, there was a stall selling rubber dinosaurs and other prehistoric monsters as stocking fillers. There was also a stall of home made jams and a woman selling butterfly cakes and what not- and tea at only 20p.

I did manage to purchase a book (second hand) The Mineralogy of Great Britain and Ireland by Gregg and Lettson. I think it must be one of the classic text books as it was first published in 1858, going through many subsequent editions and a comprehensive update. What is special about the book is that it does pinpoint where rocks and minerals are to be found. All recent books on mineralogy do not do this as if wanting to discourage the collecting minerals samples. I do wonder if mineralogy, in providing details of specific locations, was the first branch of natural history to actually do so, a practice that was to be followed by other natural history specialists like e.g. Edward Newman in his ground breaking book on British lepidoptera published in the 1850s. Of course the mapping of geological strata and mineral deposits was massively influenced by the development of industrial capitalism and the same cannot be said for butterflies and moths though it was influenced in less obvious ways (the non conformist scienticism of the 19th century seeking emancipation from scientific scholasticism) but also on a subjective level-the hunt for variations and the most striking possible variety-an anesthetization/sanitization of the Victorian freak show and a desire to escape from increasing uniformity and deadness through the cult of natural marvels.

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Above: Liesegang ring photos from Bradford city centre deploying the new Rajasthan stone having discarded Elland flags.

Random photos of leisegang rings in 'york' stone (i.e. Rajasthan stone) laid around a signature bus shelter erected in 2011 to much fanfare and wide open to the elements. This anti-shelter with a roof so tall it affords no protection whatsoever from the slanting rain marks the southern boundary of the precincts of Bradford City Hall. Laid for aesthetic effect, the rings that ripple across the paving stones are most visible after a shower of rain. The stone slabs are about as substantial as sliced bread and, in due course, the pedestrianized area will resemble crazy paving, for the thin slabs crack under the slightest pressure. Not included are outstanding examples of leisegang rings I noticed around the Houses of Parliament in Westminster, London, on returning home from a violent student demonstration in late 2010 ostensibly against a rise in tuition fees but really more against the destructive totality of the capitalist present. I missed the best shot of all when, examining the leisegang rings in Bradford, a well worn Eid shoe on the foot of an Asian girl appeared in the view finder of my camera. On the embroidered leather tongue, the word 'rebel' had been stencilled.

The varied and warm palette of the leisegang rings is a reminder of the origin of life on earth and the chemical exchange between the organic and inorganic. Leisegang rings, minus the CO2 are the truth of Gaia writ in stone. How very ironical to think the effects of this exchange, and once the mark of corrupted stone, are now at an aesthetic premium, and an adornment of power at the very moment life on earth is so threatened. The showcasing of something beautiful is the harbinger of death here, just as it is in every other instance where display is paramount.

A definitive explanation of banded iron formations is still wanting but most agree it is the product of photosynthesizing bacteria in the oceans, the oxygen from which combines with weathered, 'black' iron washed from continental rocks at a time in earth's history when there was little oxygen in the earth's atmosphere to redden it. Ruskin was the first to fully appreciate the unadulterated purity, the pale gold, of Bradford stone. Yet he was also fascinated by the several stages of rust, its ceaseless, transforming power the promise of a more varied, industrially 'fantastic' future in which the organic is given its due, a view that goes someway to explaining why sites of industrial dereliction are so liberating and inspiring-and not only in Bradford. An enzyme amongst metals, rusting iron was the coral of mineralogy, though the state of geological knowledge was not then sufficiently advanced for Ruskin to adequately link the high grade magnetite ore that dazzled him in the barges plying the Bradford Canal with the oxidized iron shales moving in solution between the joints and bedding plates of sediment laid down 900 million years ago. Fors Clavigera was partially the outcome of his uphill, almost non existent contact with the working people of Bradford and Bingley in which he called for an end to free market liberalism and its replacement by a high Tory Bolshevism. The book concludes "There is no wealth but life". Perhaps he also should have added but for rust there would neither be wealth nor life.

Stuart Wise: August 2011 (Additional notes and photos, July 2012)