Recently, I went to Dorset for a few days. As part of my explorations, I drove to Worth Matravers and then walked to St Aldhelm’s Chapel.
St Aldhelm’s Chapel, Dorset
This place of worship, built on the clifftop, is over 800 years old. As you approach through the farmland, the chapel appears squat and close to the ground. The walls are braced against the wild, coastal weather by powerful buttresses. The chapel is only one storey high and built entirely of stone. A single, narrow door admits you to the interior, which is dark and wet underfoot. Dark because a tiny stained glass window and the doorway are the only sources of light. Wet because the roof needs some attention. Whilst recognisably a chapel, the interior felt like a cave. The stone floor glistened with water, but one could sit comfortably on a pew. Different worlds, the sacred and the profane, had got used to each other in this place. They had lived together so long that they were now content in each other’s company.
I sat down to experience this unique atmosphere and the silence. Outside, the wind blew, gulls called, and the sea crashed on the base of the cliff. But the ancient stones of St Aldhelm’s absorbed all these sounds. Inside, the chapel was silent.
Silence is so rare as to be a luxury. To be part of the modern world is to be surrounded by noise. Distant music, the hum of central heating systems, fans, vacuum cleaners, aircraft, power tools, cars, motorcycles, pinging devices, loud conversations. But here on a headland in Dorset, all gone. It was as if I were seeing a beautiful view; I marvelled and wanted to drink it in. So I did. I sat in silence and let my mind clear, let it drift towards the glorious nothing that is so elusive. I was intensely aware that other human beings had sat in that same place for centuries. They were all seeking the same experience as me, an escape from the cluttered, noisy, everyday world. The world of expectations, responsibilities and demands. As this place is a chapel, many would have been mindful of the words of the psalmist “Be still, and know that I am God”. But there is something for everyone in silence. It is a reset, a welcome escape from too-much. A moment of deep, personal peace.
Photographers love the Golden Hour, the period before sunset when the sun is low in the sky and the light is much warmer than during the day. The low light picks out details and throws enticing shadows. Everything is bathed in a warm, golden glow. It is a special, fleeting time of day. Fleeting because soon the sun will set and this glow will be gone.
Ashdown Forest is showing the first signs of spring. The early flowers are poking through the woodland floor, buds are emerging on the trees. The evergreens have saved the forest from monotones throughout the winter. The spring blush of green is not far off. The winter monotone is not shades of grey but shades of brown. The golds and beiges of fallen bracken, dead leaves and rotting wood. When the spring sunshine of Golden Hour illuminates these winter shades, something magical happens.
After a day staring at a screen, an hour in the forest will refresh you. It’s an entangled world that operates in its own way. It doesn’t need human intervention, it just needs human appreciation.
My protest photography usually takes place at environmental or progressive events. So attending the farmers’ protest on 19/11/2024 was a different experience. The star guests were Nigel Farage and Jeremy Clarkson.
I went as a photojournalist, to record what I saw. There was a lot of anger out there. This young man was leading chants. His complaints about the plight of farmers merged into complaints about loss of freedom, an antagonistic government and dark forces that threatened us all. I am sympathetic to the situation of farmers, but I wouldn’t wish to amplify some of the stuff he was talking about.
These are difficult times. We live in a complex world, where bad actors use simplistic solutions to try and divide one group from another. The complexity has to be embraced because it is real. But rather than simply blaming others for our situation, bridges need to be built and cooperation has to be encouraged. Environmental campaigners need to talk to farmers and build a mutual understanding of how threats can be addressed. Together we are better.
Restore Nature Now is a campaign led by writer and TV presenter Chris Packham that aims to improve the state of nature in the UK urgently. The campaign could not be more timely. The State of Nature report was published on Wednesday 28th September 2023 and it makes grim reading. Most of the indicators of ecological health and biological diversity are headed in the wrong direction with extinction of some species highly likely and reduced numbers of other plants and animals almost inevitable. The report can be read online here https://stateofnature.org.uk/
Restore Nature Now organised an action outside DEFRA in London as a response to the report. Hundreds of people attended and blocked the road to listen to a succession of speakers including Packham himself. It was a day of mixed emotions. I was heartened by so many people attending an action in London on a working day. It was also extremely encouraging to see a well-known advocate for nature like Chris Packham taking steps along the direct action path in defence of nature. It was also heartbreaking to see scientists and leaders of wildlife charities in tears as they spoke to the crowd. They were in tears because of what was in the report and what they knew personally about the state of nature in the UK.
Things are bad. Pollution, development, pesticide use, intensive farming, busy roads, and vandalism are all directly or indirectly killing wild nature. It’s not like we can do without nature. That’s where our oxygen, water and food come from. Nature keeps us alive.
Read the report. It’s fine to be upset, you should be upset. Then get active. Join your local wildlife group. Join Greenpeace, join Extinction Rebellion. Do something to turn around this death-wish world.
Recently, I made a trip to East Tilbury in Essex to follow up a lead for my current photography project. As part of my project to examine the relationship between human beings and the planet, I was thinking about rubbish. We produce enormous amounts of rubbish and we aren’t very careful about disposing of it.
The article explains how enormous amounts of rubbish from London got dumped in sparsely populated areas of Essex. This was mainly because there was little local opposition to the practice. Once established, there was very little regulation of what could and could not be dumped there. Unsurprisingly, the dumps became toxic and dangerous places. Most were finally closed down in the 1960s and 70s. A layer of earth was spread over the waste and that should have been the end of all that rubbish. But that wasn’t the case. Rising sea levels mean the Thames is eating away at the dumps where they meet the river. Rubbish dumped long ago is starting to reappear and enter the water.
This was exactly the story I needed for the project, so I made the trip to East Tilbury. I parked up at Coalhouse Fort and set off West along the coastal path. There is a beach where the land meets the sea, but it bore witness to the area’s past as a recipient of waste. The sand was overlaid with a layer of building rubble, bricks and sea glass. That’s a rather kind term for broken bottles that have been worn smooth by the action of the water. I found strips of fabric protruding from the mud. A tug confirmed that the rest of the fabric was buried. This is old waste reappearing as the Thames washes away the soil cap on the dump.
Walking a little further, I encountered the characteristic mound of a covered landfill. The rest of the land is a flat floodplain, the signs of human activity are very apparent. The landfill started at the edge of the water and extended inland. Fortunately, I was there at low tide and could walk along the beach between the Thames and the landfill. It was obvious where the landfill was leaking. Just above the high water mark, sections of the bank had collapsed revealing the long-buried rubbish. There were sheets of plastic and large pieces of fabric, bottles and storage jars, straps, bags, pipes, metalwork and food wrappers. This stuff is being exposed by the action of the Thames at high tide. This plastic rubbish is getting into the river and hence into the sea. Landfills in the UK are contributing to ocean plastic.
Depressing? Yes, very. Even rubbish that should have disappeared forever 50 years ago is back, causing trouble. There is so much waste out there in the 20,000 landfills in the UK. What is it all doing? Leaking microplastics, methane, toxic leachate and heavy metals, no doubt.
That’s a painful thought, so let me end on something lighter. My return walk took me over the top of the landfill. A thick layer of soil had been used to cap the waste and nature had returned in abundance. There was thick vegetation, wild flowers and the kind of tangled scrub that provides shelter for all kinds of creatures. Nature is not just flowers, brambles, birds and animals. It’s a powerful flow of biology that constantly seeks to make the world productive and alive.
Many large corporations have persuaded themselves that their profits and shareholder value are more important than a living planet. Not only do they behave with no regard for future generations but they also put huge efforts into wrecking any attempts by government to limit their activities. Recently a new low in corporate behaviour was revealed.
The Wood Group with offices in Aberdeen and Staines, took a £430 million green transition loan from the UK government. These loans are intended to help companies make the transition to a more sustainable business model. Wood, however, once it had secured the loan, grew its oil and gas business by 17% and reduced the size of its renewable, hydrogen, and carbon capture business units by 35%. This looks like fraud to me and I hope it is treated as such. [source]
So today I was delighted to be asked to photograph an action by Extinction Rebellion Staines to highlight Wood’s despicable behaviour. The rebels sprayed the front of the Staines office with fake oil and staged a noisy demonstration.
If we clear a field to grow crops, we do what we need to do. If we create a pasture for a cow, that’s a traditional way of feeding ourselves. If we build a home, that’s okay, we need shelter. If we build a cathedral, our spirits soar and we contemplate the best that we can be.
But if we take fertile land and dump our rubbish there, that is wicked. Our lives should not generate non-compostable, non-reusable rubbish. We have no right to do that, we have no right to sully the Earth with our waste. Yet we do it in unbelievable volumes, as communities and individuals. In the bin, gone away. In the sea, gone away. Down the alley, gone away.
Except it hasn’t gone away. It festers and pollutes and bears witness to human fecklessness. It’s also everywhere. This is an alley behind houses in Feltham, but it could be anywhere. There are places like this in my home town. Every roadside is a trail of rubbish. Apart from the ecological damage, where is people’s pride in the place they live? Why do they put up with this? Are they so used to living in a society that relies on buying things, throwing them away and buying more that this is normal?
It might be normal but it isn’t right. The Earth is not our rubbish dump, it’s our life-support system.
When Jair Bolsonaro was president of Brazil, he was frequently challenged on his encouragement of deforestation. His stock reply was an accusation of hypocrisy; “you have cut down and exploited your forests, what shouldn’t we do the same?”.
Sadly, he has a point.
Britain is by default a forest area. Left to its own devices, some density of woodland would cover almost all the land. Only mountain tops would be bare. But Britain is not an untouched paradise, human beings have been clearing land for farming and housing, cutting trees for ships and housing, and interfering with the landscape for thousands of years. Whereas Britain was once almost entirely covered by trees, now only 13% of the land is wooded. This is one of the lowest woodland levels in Europe, much of which is industrial plantations of non-native softwoods. Woodland in Britain is horribly depleted and regarded as little more than a cash crop.
This attitude ignores the wonderful richness of natural woodland. Trees grow slowly, over many seasons. As they grow, their leaf mould creates a rich, fertile environment for shade-loving plants and fungi. This in turn provides food and shelter for animals from bugs to deer. A woodland can be a beautifully abundant, self-regulating ecosystem if it is allowed to develop and exist naturally, without interference.
The picture above is of the South Downs looking towards Cuckmere Haven. Two thousand years ago, this would have been a forest of oak, beech hazel and alder. Deer, bears, wolves and auroch would have lived here. It would have been a delight. Now it is a sea of grass, home only to sheep and passing birds.
It is right that the South Downs is a national park, to protect it from further development. But what is being protected? The national park is a monument to 200-year-old farming practices. So much more can be done. If the land is protected from the destructive teeth of sheep, it will regenerate and return to its forest state. More carbon dioxide sequestered, more diversity, a thriving ecosystem, more wildlife, and more nature for people to enjoy.
It’s not enough to preserve what is left of the natural world, it needs to be actively restored. A green desert isn’t good enough, we need the return of the wildwood.
Why on earth do we tolerate oil companies? Yet they are all around us, in every town.
Shell is a familiar oil company brand. The red and yellow livery is warm and distinctive. You are always close to a Shell petrol station. But this company’s business model is based on profit before human life. Shell’s business is extracting and selling fossil fuels, the source of the excess carbon dioxide that threatens the future of human civilisation. But no one talks about that threat, it’s not part of everyday conversation.
Newspapers love to play on people’s fears: covid, refugees, cancer, and the cost of living crisis. But the biggest threat to the future of humanity comes from highly profitable, multi-national companies whose product destabilises the climate of the only planet on which we can live. Despite the existential threat that companies like Shell present, they are seen as respectable businesses. Members of parliament sit on their boards and receive donations from them.
This is the insane Orwellian world in which we live. Carbon dioxide emissions are not regarded as a deadly serious danger that must be reduced as much as possible. Fossil fuel businesses operate within hopelessly inadequate rules and can claim to be law-abiding providers of jobs and tax revenues. Those who call out the scientific consensus and demand change are jailed and reviled.
This is the extent of the journey we need to take. It’s time to stop accepting oil companies as urbane and respectable members of the business community. Rather, those who run them must become pariahs and those people who work for them must have just options to transition to other work.
Surely the sky should just be the sky. When it breaks free from the trees and buildings, that should be the end of artifice. Beyond the skyline, the sky and only the sky.
Yet the industrial growth society extends into the sky as well. A blue morning sky is riven with vapour trails. They point to business meetings in Brussels and deals in Dubai. Holidays in Hawaii and family gatherings in Finland.
I don’t mind these things but let me look up and be at peace as I gaze into the blue yonder. Let me look up at the heavens and marvel as my ancestors did.
The climate and ecological emergency is the biggest threat facing the human world. So it would be reasonable to expect that news media would be keeping us constantly informed. Sadly, that isn’t the case. Newspapers mainly reflect the political agendas of their owners and editors. Climate change and action to prevent it is a threat to right-wing newspaper owners and their friends in polluting industries, so useful information about the crisis doesn’t tend to appear in these newspapers. By newspapers, I mean traditional printed media and their digital counterparts.
I took a look at which newspapers have dedicated climate and environment sections. This seemed likely to indicate what priority these newspapers accorded to the crisis. First UK newspapers:
On two occasions I have ascended to the uppermost level of a public car park to take photographs. On both occasions, car park staff appeared to ask me if I’m okay. It seems that part of managing a multi-story car park in twenty-first century Britain is trying to stop people from jumping off the top to their deaths.
The first time it happened, I was amused; the over-zealous safety culture in action. The second time, I was disturbed. Maybe the car park managers aren’t overzealous, maybe this is a serious problem. It is. The man who came to check on me at a car park in Worthing was about my own age, probably more at home fixing a lifting barrier than dealing with a disturbed and suicidal person. Having assured him that I was there to photograph urban sprawl and brandishing my camera as evidence, I asked him about the situation. He had worked at the car park for four years and in that time four people had jumped to their deaths.
We walked around the top deck of the car park. The pavement was six floors below. Signs from the Samaritans invited the reader to call them and talk. Hand-made signs from kindly local people reminded me that I could get through this and that I was loved. Clearly, there is something wrong here, something dark and disturbing. Something that the car park staff, the Samaritans and local people were trying to address.
For both males and females in the UK, suicide is the leading cause of death in the age group of 20 to 34 years. Intentional self-harm, in the dry language of the Office of National Statistics. Not accidents, not cancer, these people had decided that they wanted death and had got what they wanted. The oblivion of a mangled body at the bottom of a six-storey fall was preferable to life.
I have been blessed with good physical and mental health all my life. I know it is a blessing, a winning hand in the card game of life and I am grateful. I also realise that others are less fortunate, they struggle to get from one day to the next. For me, the top of a car park is a high point from which I can take strikingly different photographs. For others, it’s an emergency exit from a world of pain.
Maybe death represents certainty. Oblivion is an end of everything, but at least it’s an end. No more pain, no more uncertainty, no more hurt, no more rejection, no more hopelessness. Just eternal peace.
This is so incredibly sad. That the greatest thing we possess, existence, is too much much to bear. The unique privilege of being a sentient being has turned to poison. How desperately, terribly sad.
This place used to be called Killicks Farm. There is nothing to hint at that name now, I only know because I found a map from 1878 of the area. A farm on the top of a hill, at the edge of a small market town in the Sussex countryside.
Even at the end of the 19th century, the farm was bounded to the south by a railway line. The land had been broken and reshaped to allow passengers to travel from Crawley in the west to Tunbridge Wells in the east. The train whistles and the rattle of waggons would have been clearly heard by the cows on Killicks Farm and by the people who ran the farm.
Those whistles heralded the end of the farm. The land changed hands and work began to build a railway line north, towards London. Killicks Farm wasn’t needed for the mainline. A curving loop was to be built so that trains could transfer from the north-south line to the east-west line. So one day the cows were led off the farm for the last time and were replaced by teams of men with digging tools. First, the soil that contained the life and productivity of the farm was dug up and stripped away. Then they started digging into the underlying rock, going down around 10 metres, splitting the hilltop and providing a level route for trains to get from the north of the town to the station further south.
The loop isn’t just a simple cut through the earth. Roads that had been severed by the cutting had to be reinstated on top of brick-built bridges. Where the sides of the cutting were especially high and steep, elaborate retaining walls had to be built to immobilise the land. Finally, a crushed stone trackbed was created, sleepers and rails were laid and then trains could begin to use the new route. A pastoral scene was transformed into a place of broken rock, iron and steam.
In the late Victorian era and the first half of the twentieth century, the railways were how the country moved around. Passengers, freight, livestock, mail, food and supplies for war moved more reliably than ever before, freed from having to travel on poor quality, muddy roads.
The industrial ingenuity that built the railways soon moved on to new innovations. Cars, buses and lorries became more popular ways of getting around. The quality of road surfaces improved in response to the needs of these vehicles. By the 1960s, the railways were in decline and losing money. The solution was radical. Close the lines that were losing the most money and shrink the network to the profitable commuter routes.
The east-west route was closed. The route south from the town to Lewes was closed. The loop was closed. Signals, rails and sleepers were removed. Only the mainline to London remained.
The loop became quiet. It was a route that was of no use to anyone. Despite all the outrages committed upon it, nature started to occupy this place. Scrub and then trees began to grow, badgers dug setts, birds built nests. Cars, buses and lorries crossed the bridges in increasing numbers. Frequently, the bridges support traffic jams, not travel. The loop lies beneath the bridges, largely forgotten by local people.
Now, if you venture into the loop from the southern end, two impressions dominate; nature and rubbish. These are impressions at odds with each other. Nature produces no rubbish. Everything decomposes and feeds future generations. Humans produce enormous amounts of rubbish which are a problem for future generations. This dichotomy plays out in the loop. Scrub grows abundantly, providing protection for saplings. Beercans and fast-food wrappers rain down from the bridges as drinkers stumble home. Birdsong fills the air as a wheeled hospital chair faces the sunset. Delicate moss invades a ruined television. Foxes trot past a discarded propane gas bottle.
In our system of stuff, food wrapping and elderly consumer goods have no value. But a gas bottle does. When you buy gas, the price includes a deposit on the container. Return the bottle and you get your money back. It’s a good system. But someone was too lazy or in too much of a hurry to make this simple contribution to the circular economy. I will never know how this bottle got to be on the abandoned trackbed of the loop. I suspect that builders working at one of the houses that back onto the rim of the cutting, couldn’t be bothered to return the bottle and rolled it down the slope instead. But I will never know for sure.
So this bottle will continue to lie amongst the leaves and moss. Its strange dull orange colour permanently at odds with the shades of green and brown around it. It will remain a testament to our way of life. Of abandoning things that we no longer have a use for, rather than making them into something new. Nature is expert at converting dead and discarded material into new life. We humans are incredibly poor at doing this.
This is why an abandoned gas bottle lies on an abandoned trackbed at the bottom of an abandoned railway cutting. Abandoned, discarded and someone else’s problem.
This structure is the High Street Multi-Storey Car Park in Worthing. I would imagine, perhaps naively, that a car park would be built to serve something, built so that people could park before visiting that thing. A station car park would allow people to park before getting on the train. A sports centre car park would allow people to park whilst swimming or playing badminton.
The High Street Car Park in Worthing is so big that a large part of the High Street has been demolished to make way for it. So the very thing that the car park has been built to serve … has been demolished to accommodate the car park.
Just think about how absolutely crazy this is. Towns are about people. Towns and cities are where people live and work. Homes, shops, cafes, pubs, workshops, offices, schools, doctor’s surgeries, dentists and churches are the building blocks of a town. They are deliberately close together so that people can get their business done easily. That’s why towns grew up as they did and that’s why people live there. Because it’s easy.
Cars break all that. Large traffic volumes mean either horribly congested streets or the town remodelled to accommodate new roads. Think of quaint holiday villages jammed solid in the summer as people attempt to drive bulky cars down streets laid down for walkers and ponies. Think of towns where the heart has been ripped and replaced with a one-way system and brutalist concrete multi-stories, the occasional historic building cowering amidst the tarmac.
Planners now talk of walkable cities as if this were an astounding new concept, an architectural elixir of life. But all towns and cities started life as “walkable”. The occupants moved easily from their homes to the shops, to school, to church to their friends. Walkable is the default state of towns and cities.
It’s time to end the love affair with the car. They have their uses, but driving around towns isn’t one of them.
Go to an ancient urban area like Soho, Canterbury or Bury St Edmonds. Marvel at the intimacy and practicality of the streets, remember that these streets have worked like this for hundreds of years.
Tear down the concrete and tarmac and replace them with community. Rather than traffic fumes, the air will smell of cooking. Rather than the roar of traffic, you will be able to hear people laughing outside the pub. That’s better.
If you are a climate activist who has engaged in direct action, or you have supported people who have taken direct action, you will have been told that you are doing it wrong. Blocking traffic, glueing on, locking on, marching, staging a die-in, all of these are the wrong approach. Apparently.
It’s also the case that when you challenge a sceptic, you will be told that you should write to your MP. So let’s think about that.
Fracking is a particularly contentious aspect of oil and gas exploitation. It brings the oil business to nice rural parts of the UK that don’t want heavy lorries and drilling happening on their doorstep. Fracking is also associated with causing small earthquakes and threatening water supplies. So there was a huge sigh of relief in 2019 when the Conservative government placed a moratorium on further fracking activity. This policy formed part of their election manifesto and they won with a significant majority.
Since then, the founder of Quadrilla, the main company exploring fracking in the UK has publicly said that the geology of the UK was not suitable for fracking and it wouldn’t happen.
That should have been game over for fracking, but then a new Conservative government under Liz Truss entered office. This government is well and truly in the pocket of fossil fuel companies. Former oil company people in government, including the prime minister herself. Oil company donations were flowing in. Suddenly the government announced that they were looking again at fracking.
Naturally, there was outrage. Much of this came from Conservative backbenchers who had potential or dormant fracking sites in their constituencies. They had been elected on a pledge of no fracking and now the government was reversing that position.
Labour moved quickly and put down a motion demanding a permanent ban on fracking. Conservative MPs were put in an impossible situation. Voting as their constituents would want (for a fracking ban) would mean they would have to side with Labour. Voting against a fracking ban would be seen as reneging on their 2019 election commitments. Matters were made worse by the Conservative whips insisting that this motion was a de-facto confidence vote in the government.
The votes were cast and the Labour motion was defeated. But the vote was accompanied by chaotic and angry scenes. At the last moment, the Conservative climate change minister spoke in the house and said that the vote was not a confidence matter. This undermined the reasoning that many MPs were employing to decide how to vote. It was also deeply confusing and there were angry scenes in the lobbies as Conservative MPs openly argued amongst themselves.
Last night and this morning, many Conservative MPs are having to explain to their constituents why they continue to oppose fracking but refused to vote for a ban on it. Obviously, that is a wholly inconsistent position and can only be explained by these MPs preferring to put party allegiance before the country and constituents.
Last night’s events show why writing to your MP about something as critical to our future as oil and gas exploration is not an adequate response. Conservative MPs have shown quite clearly that they are willing to play political games with something as serious as the climate crisis.
They are not to be trusted, so why trust them?
Mass civil disobedience is the only tactic that has consistently delivered progressive social change. Waiting for politicians to get with the programme simply doesn’t work.
So ignore the naysayers, get out on the streets and show solidarity for those already there. This is what will make the difference.
Orford Ness is a shingle spit just off the Suffolk coast. Despite being treeless and exposed, it is rich in wildlife. It is also a monument to some of mankind’s more destructive tendencies.
The area is now in the care of the National Trust. Birds, hares and otters thrive under the trust’s protection. A small boat takes visitors between the village of Orford and the Ness, trust volunteers are on hand to answer questions.
The last incumbent was less friendly to visitors and wildlife. For most of the 20th century, Orford Ness was used by the Ministry of Defence to develop and test ever more destructive weapon technologies. The Atomic Weapons Research Establishment used the site to create nuclear weapons in the post-Second World War period. The legacy of this occupation is a scattering of bizarre and foreboding buildings across the shingle.
The Bomb Ballistic Building is part of this legacy. The building is about 400 metres from the sea and was built to observe the path of bombs dropped from aircraft flying over the water. The data from these observations were used to improve the accuracy of bomb aiming, including atomic bombs.
I knew that Orford Ness was a strange place, a mixture of a nature reserve and a dark past. But as I walked across the Ness and around these buildings, I was reminded of how much effort and resources we humans put into killing each other. We have evolved from hitting one another with clubs to being able to deliver bombs from high in the sky with the ability to kill hundreds of thousands of people with one blast.
All this has been accomplished with unlimited budgets. Politicians have always quibbled about supporting the poor, but budgets for “defence” go unchallenged. Killing gets a blank cheque, helping each other is met with excuses and the bare minimum of cash.
The National Trust has sought to preserve Orford Ness as they found it. They encourage wildlife, preserve some of the more notable buildings and let others gradually deteriorate. They don’t clear up the man-made debris, they leave it as a testimony to this era of frenzied weapons development.
I agree with this decision. Visitors need to be struck by the horror of what this landscape was used for, as I was. And they need to know that nature can and will reclaim the land.
The hottest day ever in England was a good day to remind East Sussex County Council of their climate responsibilities. XR activists from the Lewes area simply requested that the county council divest their pension investments from oil companies and also produce an urgent plan of action to tackle climate change in East Sussex. The council were very reluctant to do anything. The resulting occupation resulted in the activists being physically removed from the council offices.
Much of my reportage work is from the front line of climate actions. These actions are intended to put pressure on government bodies, councils and businesses to Act Now. My photography can help amplify the efforts of the activists. An action on the street may be seen by a few hundred people. If there is coverage of that action in the media, thousands get to see it.
At the beginning of an English spring, this sapling should show the first glimpses of new green foliage. Instead, it is shrouded in plastic film, threatened and suffocated.
To the west of this tree is a waste disposal business. Tyres, concrete, cars, washing machines and all kinds of rubbish await their fate. Wind and carelessness ensure that the contents of this yard leak out beyond the perimeter fence. No doubt these sheets of plastic were blown from the yard during a recent storm. Now they have become faux blossoms, sabotaging the process of pollination that ensures the tree’s survival. Plastic is lifeless and inert. It smothers life and vitality.
Democracy isn’t just voting every five years, it is a constant dialogue between the people and government. Protest allows people to turn up the volume. Don’t let this government take it away.
Say no to the Policing Bill that is before parliament now.
