The bun above is called a 'Devonshire Split' for those that don't know
Recently for some inescapable daft reason the Uk's government revealed plans (i.e.we were the last to know) to sell off half the country's forest. Unfortunately the MP pushing this is in cohoots (apparently don't ask me who the source is) with the Biotech industry. I thought Ents were just a fictitious entity - thought up by Tolkien but now it seems there's a possibility after all of hybridised tree people...
So, I thought well, there's some very well intentioned land trusts, and Britain really ought to be in British hands. Locals should have access to and responsibility for their local forests. Potentially an ecologically sustainably managed forest has many dividends:-
- People can live in low impact dwellings there
- Forest gardens can be grown providing a higher yield per acre than anything Monsanto can cobble together with chemicals and a DNA shoestring.
- Composting coppice waste can provide natural gas to power cars, generators, heating, lighting etc. Check out the film Bate's car
- They can still produce wood to the degree they do now under the industrialised model, but in a safer, more balanced and long term manner for all creatures.
- Profits can be reinvested locally rather than siphoned off to Mr MultiBillionaire in AbuDhabi or Bombay or on his little island.
It goes on - the dividends that is. So, my idea is to get locals, like kids, scouts, schools, businesses to invest co-operatively and buy shares in their local area. They will then be able to safeguard their countryside from golf courses, holdiay camps, open cast mining and the generally degenerate intentions of multinationals.
They will be able to participate, and benefit from primary and secondary products. A
forest garden produces, wood, fodder, fuel, vegetables, mushrooms, herbs, fruit, nuts, honey, candles, soaps - you name it you can get it from a forest garden, I mean that is after all where pretty much everything comes from that we need.
Kids will learn directly about how they meet their basic needs. Communities will become more self sufficient. Then they can channel their spare time and energies into well creativity, art, sculpture, music, invention, and yes maybe even Space!
They will be healthier, people will be at less risk from golf ball injuries and flying golf clubs flung by stressed out politicians who didn't get their way after all because the People, yes, them the great Downtrodden peasants - did uprise, and rose up and done away with the bill that wasn't in everyone's best interests. And they did take back their countryside that had been nicked from them in the first place by the Army and which their great grandfathers had lost their heads for.
That's the difference between Britain and France. In France it was the People who lopped off the heads of the ones who'd nicked everything up to then, whereas in Britain the royals were crafty folk and their trusting servants lost their heads FIRST and it's been that way ever since. We STILL trust them to know what their doing and then we find ourselves headless, or homeless, or mortgaged up to the hilt with high blood pressure and a shorter life span and wondering how it got that bad.
So you can join the FB group here
'Buy Britain Back' and choose how and why and what way you will buy it back. If you're not British and you want to help us - Great! You're always welcome for a cup of tea and to reminisce about old times when we had back bone, and new times when we took up our laptops and did battle for our freedom and fair green valleys once again, albeit with a multicultural appreciation that comes from having left the place or arrived their afresh from some place else.
You can learn how to set up a co-operative and or land trust. Which is what the big companies and the government also did, to hide the fact they bought our neighbourhoods and treasured places as collateral for giant loans to fund space missions, wars and hadron colliders. And now they have to pay it back... except they're saying it's because of a 'financial crisis'. Oh really, a financial crisis caused by what, oh yes, a TEN YEAR war where hundreds of thousands of pounds explodes everytime you blow up a missile, where suicide bombing is encouraged by foreign occupation, to what; TO SECURE THE OIL and it's PIPELINE. And where three to five times the amount of military killed are civilians and most of them children.
My point being we have to concentratre on where we are at; get strong, get sustainable. Because if you're not sustainable you ARE on a sinking ship that WILL sink. Get together pull a sofa outside, watch the sunset, listen to songs from the laptop and guitar round a fire, full up after you're deliciously organic scrumptious local meal, of easy to grow potatoes, carrots, and wotnot. And then there's the home brews, of damson and nettle wines, of mead and hoppy beers, of strawberry champagnes. The kids are QUIET because they've been outdoors ALL day and are ASLEEP. OMG, and there's not an unruly dubious chemical insight to disturb their precious equilibrium. And all this is like this because Grandma took out a share in the local forest which made the town totally economically sustainable and self sufficient for EVER. And they are now planning space missions because their aren't any starving people left on the planet as we finally got our priorities right. Check it out grandma, grandpa, uncle You...
Here's to co-ops, and land trusts,and communities who give a damn. And to ginger beer, and Devonshire Splits (see above apparently random photograph). Personally I would like Devonshire to remain unsplit, and all it's forests to remain Devonian, and not sold off like football players. NOT FOR SALE is my goal and cherished wish - actually for the whole entire planet but one patch of a mossy ground at a time eh! Now where's my pitchfork?
