So, in Pt.1 practical steps were promised. And they're coming yet, for aw that. First, some strange bedfellows...
... it wouldn't be an unco post without a little context. I mean it when I say little, honest guv, I will try to keep this brief before getting to the nub.
Faced with the discontinuity climate crises signal to us all, present and impending, enforced and necessary, whilst making my own further steps into ruggedisation, attempting to mitigate against them, I find my anthropological mind dwelling on deep time. Specifically, on how it places what is here and what is to come in a much wider context.
It doesn't change what needs to be done. Nor does it condone procrastination, much as it may seem that way, particularly when added to the weight of prevailing systems dependent on the sense of ubiquity and inevitability they inculcate in us.
Despite the seeming entropy, the mass and momentum, wilfully foregrounding futility and ‘oh-dearism’, the political prestidigitation of precarity, keeping us apparently necessarily selfish, living hand to mouth, just getting by, choosing between heating and eating, oh and the now, again, rise of populism pointing fingers of blame at easy others, symptoms not causes, these posts, above all else are a crie de couer. All is not lost and resistance is not futile.
But what does genuine resistance really look like now? Cathartic and often essential as it may be to organise, to march, to break out the placards and bullhorns, to rage against...something, the same prevailing systems making it so have long developed ways and means of controlling, even monetising, extracting from, those narratives too. This would become a much longer aside if it detailed and counted the ways.
Briefly, consider this though.
What we now understand as the Anthropocene era, evolving from and building upon the historical genesis of the idea, weighing assessment of anthropogenic signatures in the geological record against formal requirements for recognition of such a new epoch, means there is more to consider than ‘just’ the geology.
Whilst formal establishment (a process referred to previously by this blog, here) an Anthropecene epoch would mark, marks, a fundamental change in how we consider the relationship between humans and the earth system. However, that makes little to no difference regarding how that relationship has been managed during the periods we need to consider, while we go abut this necessary business. It may make a difference to how we can, need to, change that relationship.
There is strong evidence to suggest, as geologists attempt to contextualise and define the new human dominated period of earth's history, to place it in the context of deep time, the debate over where to mark the beginning of this new epoch has as much to teach us about how we look at our own history, as well as what it means to our future, as it does about the geologic history of the planet we inhabit.
Today, human impact on the environment, on the earth, can seem both immense and obvious in that immensity.
Humans move more soil, rock and sediment each year than is transported by all other natural processes combined. We are responsible for instigating the sixth mass extinction in Earth's history. We have accelerated warming of the global climate to such an extent we have delayed the next Ice Age.
We annually produce, monoculturally, 4.8 billion tonnes of our top five crops and 4.8 billion livestock animals. There are 1.4 billion motor vehicles, 2 billion personal computers, more mobile phones than the 8 billion people alive on earth, and counting, with little sign of any marked system change, political, social or cultural, to alter the trajectories of those growing numbers.
Humans have become a geological superpower and evidence of our impact on the earth will be visible in rocks millions of years from now. Our excesses have increased exponentially since our earliest ancestors climbed down from the trees and began hunting some animal species into extinction.
The ten thousand years of ‘stability’ we call the Holocene, wherein farming and complex civilisations developed, also started to change the climate. Yet Earth only truly became a ‘human planet’ with the emergence of something much more destructive and homogenising.
European expansion in the 15th and 16th centuries brought on the era of colonisation, marked by subjugation of indigenous peoples and extraction of resources from lands inhabited by them, all around the world. Out of this grew capitalism and so-called ‘progress’.
For subjugation, also read killing. Just one hundred years after Columbus first set foot on the Bahamas, in 1492, 90% of the South and Central American continent’s indigenous population were dead. War, slavery and wave after wave of disease combined to cause a great dying.
This depopulation left the continents dominated by Europeans, who set up plantations and filled labour shortages with more than twelve million people, forced to leave Africa and work for them as slaves. Alongside these direct, egregious crimes against fellow humans, these changes to how lands were managed, previously, carefully and respectfully, by indigenous peoples, stewards of them, also marked a carbon uptake, with a drop in atmospheric carbon dioxide recorded in Antarctic ice cores, centred around the year 1610.
Colonialism and the birth of capitalism set the earth on its new developmental trajectory, which continues largely unabated. It is no coincidence, as we compile all of the evidence, showing when humans started to exert an unprecedented influence on Earth's environment, that same evidence tells us this was also the start of brutal European colonisation of the world.
How we understand this, in a contemporary cultural anthropological sense, was changed by the Scottish enlightenment figure and forefather of geological science James Hutton. He changed how we think about time.
The context Hutton gave us, to understand deep time, also transformed our understanding of the human role and responsibilities on and for Earth. Geology may stare into the abyss of time, may use deep time to look at the past and how it got us here, but it also helps us understand how signatures in the rocks indicate the deep future too.
There are ways to reset it. Ways to learn from nature and from recontextualised, decolonised histories. Ways to teach ourselves, not least how to build genuine homes, how to build settlements, even cities, that are better for all living things than those we have arrived at, where we are now.
It is possible, that we can perhaps even repurpose a language first used by Hutton, as he developed a new understanding of eternity, based on geological evidence. In his discoveries at Siccar Point, he saw a line separating two radically different rock formations, within which tens of millions of years of time had passed.
This was what he took James Playfair and James Hall to see in 1788. He called it an unconformity.
What an unconformity represents is an absence. There is no environment or process to describe in it. There is, however, a story.
And just as the story of unconformity at Siccar Point, as told by Hutton, would change humanity's place in time, so too can unconformity in the strata of current human activity change it again.
Just as Hutton’s story was challenging to some of the fundamentals of how most people viewed the world and the place of humans in it, at the time, so too must we challenge the apparent fundamentals of perception, of how most people view it now. At least if we are to resist and change what we've been led into believing is an inevitable trajectory.
To paraphrase Hutton, time has no vestige of a beginning and no prospect of an end.
Addressing the deep future and in particular whether humankind can maintain any part in that of the Earth, the self regulating system we have seemed so intent on destroying, even though it is our only means of sustaining ourselves, takes immediate practical steps. Genuine 'longtermists' consider that the Earth will persist; whether humans are part of that future depends on us, right now. As William MacAskill has it in 'What We Owe The Future':
'...we hold the entire future in our hands. Everyday ethics rarely grapples with such a scale. We need to build a moral worldview that takes seriously whats at stake.
By choosing wisely, we can be pivotal in putting humanity on the right course. And if we do, our great-great-grandchildren will look back and thank us, knowing that we did everything we could to give them a world that is just and beautiful.'
Above all, the single most effective point of human perception to address, as we contemplate our future and consider the past which brought us here, is our complacency. It extends and continues, over vast swathes of human history and is still, as we satre down the barrel of what it has created, used as deflection, as delaying or holding patterns. Understanding, contextualising and ultimately, most importantly, changing that, has profound, general and sometimes very specific areas of necessary application and insight.
Holding that in mind, as this post, finally, moves towards its mooted practical steps, it seems necessary, given the direction of travel here, to first address a seemingly enduring misperception of what seems, at least on the face of things, a specific positive step, in terms of access to land, in Scotland. This particuarly so in the cintext of its potential as means of seeing things differently, working towards genuine change, ruggedising, genuinely rewilding, for those with more transient or passing interest.
Scotland's much vaunted and cited ‘Right to Roam’, is often, when so referred to, based in ignorance of the legislation and social policy on which it is founded. What were then new rights of responsible public access to land and the countryside, were given legislative force by the Land Reform (Scotland) Act 2003.
Access rights it conveys are upheld and managed on the ground by local and National Park authorities. The ‘Scottish Outdoor Access Code’ sets out the rights and responsibilities of land managers.
Part 1 of the Act sets out a right of responsible, non-motorised access, for recreational and other purposes, to land and inland water throughout Scotland, with a few exceptions. It is worthwhile emphasising ‘non-motorised access’ does not include towed caravans (or cars towing them, obvious as it may seem) or any other motorised vehicles, including camper vans.
There is no blanket vehicular right to roam and use of motorised vehicles on or to access land is specifically in contravention of the Act. Your car has no right to roam, no matter how much ‘freedom’ you may think it conveys upon you.
The right of access only applies if it is exercised responsibly. The Code, defined by the Act, sets out what counts as responsible behaviour in a variety of circumstance, as well as the kind of land management activities which should not be interfered with.
Again, whilst these may appear self-evident to some, other presenting behaviours beg to differ. The most obvious, in terms of land management activities which should not be interfered with, are where there are fields of crops or livestock and gardens of private houses.
Part 1 of the Act focuses on the management of access at local levels. This provides ‘access authorities’ - National Park authorities and local councils, by and large – with adequate powers to manage access in their area.
Responsibility is also placed upon access authorities to provide core paths and equal access/Access to them for everyone. Scottish Natural Heritage/NatureScot, involved in producing the initial public access delivery plan for action under Part 1 of the Act, provide a map showing all of the core paths in Scotland, here.
As made clear previously, in ‘Hame’ parts 1 and 2, how local councils interpret legislation and their responsibilities under it can vary widely. It can also often be a highly politicised process.
This happens with access to land and upholding of rights to it too. It is also nowhere more obvious than in an application for planning permissions related to land and building upon it, including what constitutes temporary, permanent and/or adequate housing, building or land use.
It should always be a necessary caveat, if interpreting or applying the following practical advice (or indeed any ‘advice’ offered in any posts here!), to check what relevant local councils apply to interpreting all of these and to defer to any legal responsibility or authority they have over them. Forewarned, forearmed etc.
Whilst these are general precautionary warnings or advice, they are aimed most at those ‘staycationing’ with campervans or caravans or who are testing their amenability to ‘van-life’, than full-on ‘ruggedisation’. Neither are ‘wrong’, in and of themselves, particularly if advocates are respectful both of everyone’s right to responsibly access land and nature, balanced against the right to privacy, or to work agriculture and forestry. The same is true of genuine ‘wild’ camping.
All of these are good first steps, tests of adaptability, even towards changing mindsets. They are not ‘ruggedising’ though, they remain recreational.
Another liminal place, along a spectrum of approaches toward ruggedising, through increased access to land and nature, which, though technically still recreational, has possibilities and potential for extending into genuine ruggedisation, is ‘hutting’. This is particularly so if considered as the type promoted by the ‘1000 Huts’ campaign.
It is run by Reforesting Scotland, a small charity campaigning for a healthy and sustainable forest culture in Scotland. It is working to reconnect contemporary Scottish hutting with its own traditions and with those far more commonplace in other European (particularly Scandinavian) countries, with much less uneven distribution of land ownership and easier general access/Access to land and nature.
Of reconnecting to Scottish hutting traditions, the campaign offers this summary:
‘Hutting is the term used for the traditional model of hut use, which came to the fore in Scotland between the First and Second World Wars, whereby workers from the industrial areas of Scotland paid a little ground rent to a landowner so they could build a simple hut for the use of their family and friends. Some hut sites of this type still exist in Scotland, including the largest, Carbeth, which has 140 huts on a 90 acre site.’
The campaign successfully lobbied for the inclusion of huts in Scottish planning policy in 2014, ‘enabling a fledgling new wave of hutting in Scotland’. The campaign site offers, both directly and via their hutting hub and networks etc, advice for navigating planning policy for hutting. They do, however, concede, of this type of access to land:
‘Currently demand far exceeds the supply of huts, however several proposed hut sites are going through the planning process now. If you would like a hut you have several options: Approach existing hut sites directly and ask to be put on the waiting list for a single hut plot; Look on the ‘1000 Huts’…(social media pages)…or join the mailing list for details of upcoming opportunities; Rent or purchase a piece of land and apply for permission yourself or with a group of friends. When you have a plot, you will have the option of: self building your hut; paying someone else to build it; purchasing an off-the- peg hut.’
They also offer the following advice:
‘Contrary to what some may believe, huts do require planning permission. Builders should not be daunted by this, as the Scottish Government created a planning policy for huts in 2014, which was designed to increase hutting across Scotland. However, it is still early days and there is a wide variation in how each planning authority is rolling out this policy…
(The campaign) …has published a guidebook… (available here as a PDF) to help hutters applying for planning permission…and to help planners make decisions on hut applications… (They)…recommend reading this before you apply for planning permission and also emailing it to the planners during your application process to ensure they understand the nature of a hut development.’
As a first step, using this advice and process, you would need to ensure that your building(s) meet the definition of a ‘hut’ in ‘Scottish Planning Policy’, which is Scottish Government policy on how nationally important land use matters should be addressed across the country. It sets out a definition of a ‘hut’ as follows:
‘A simple building used intermittently as recreational accommodation (ie. not a principal residence); having an internal floor area of no more than 30m2; constructed from low impact materials; generally not connected to mains water, electricity or sewerage; and built in such a way that it is removable with little or no trace at the end of its life. Huts may be built singly or in groups’, and continues:
‘With regard to The Building (Scotland) Regulations 2004 (building regulations), a hut is not defined. The building regulations set out types of building and work that are exempt, from regulations Schedule 1 to Regulation 3, or can be done without a warrant as long as they meet Schedule 3 to Regulation 5. The most appropriate type for a ‘recreational hut’ to be considered under would be Type 23A. As long as the building work meets the conditions set out below a building warrant would not be required.
Type 23A is ‘a detached, single-storey building, used for or sleeping in connection with recreation.’
Exceptions, which would mean a hut could not be considered as this ‘Type’, are:
- A dwelling
- A building having an area exceeding 30 square metres
- A building ancillary to another building
- A building within six metres of a boundary or of another building
- Any wastewater disposal system serving a building of this type
- a building containing a ‘gallery’ (‘a raised floor or platform which is open to the room or space into which it projects and is not enclosed below’) Or gallery's,or where there is more than one gallery, the galleries together occupy an area not more than –
- 8 square metres, or
- one-half of the area of the room or space in which it is situated, whichever is the lesser.’
Neither SPP nor The Building (Scotland) Regulations 2004 comments on time periods spent in any building falling under Type 23A. They do specify that the building must not be used as a ‘dwelling’. A dwelling is defined, for the purposes of building regulations, as:
‘A unit of residential accommodation occupied (whether or not as a sole or main residence):
- By an individual or by individuals living together as a family; or
- By not more than six individuals living together as a single household (including a household where care is provided for residents)
and includes any surgeries, consulting rooms, offices or other accommodation, of a floor area not exceeding in the aggregate 50 square metres, forming part of a dwelling and used by an occupant of the dwelling in a professional or business capacity’.
It is worth noting, in terms of time spent in a hut, the SPP definition does emphasise, in its definitions, a hut is ‘a simple building used intermittently as recreational accommodation’ but, tellingly, does not specify type of land use for the land in which it sits. This is particularly relevant to a forthcoming companion post to this, ‘Food Forest, Tiny Houses & Big Ideas’, as well as the links below to forest croft advice. In this regard, it is also worth checking local and national planning permission definitions for forestry workers' 'dwellings'.
Appealing to as wide a base in civic Scotland as possible, with the ‘1000 Huts’ campaign, Reforesting Scotland do not overtly politicise their aims. They offer advice based on current planning regulations or those they hope to influence or change. There are, however, particularly in the face of climate crises and growing food insecurity, inherently political aspects to hutting and variations on it.
In lieu of wider ownership redistribution and access/Access, being land reform of the type long campaigned for by Andy Wightman, as well as being to some extent of the type voted for by the current Scottish Government’s party members, and now somewhat diluted through the process of arrving at a new land reform bill, there are ways and means of navigating planning regulations which allow for bolder steps toward ruggedisation.
The ever present and impending, linked crises of climate, food security and housing require bold responses. The necessity of taking action now, it seems, must be pursued as a matter of individual responsibility. Land and its use, as well as what we perceive of as a home, are central to it. This is particularly so given the persistence of deferral, obfuscation and general lack of direct, necessary and immediate action taken, now, when it is required, by governments and other nominally responsible authorities.
Some of the inherently political aspects of taking action and responsibility, or not, as the case may be and so often is, may not at first appear obvious, particularly if your aims are restricted to or by regulatory definitions of ‘recreational’ or romanticised notions of access to, communing with, nature or wilderness.
This blog would argue (and this is why specific reference made by the ‘1000 Huts’ campaign to social media sites was edited out above) that using social media, hosted by tech giants or ‘surveillance Capitalists', to promote genuine reforesting or rewilding (inherently including both human responsibility for and Interaction with them), as responses to interlinked crises, is both counter-intuitive and counterproductive. The necessary, reciprocal discontinuity with prevailing systems required, due to their continuing contribution to climate change as a driver for other, linked crises, is undermined by reliance on them.
In many ways, this is perhaps best tangibly exemplified by the immense contribution to carbon emissions, as a primary driver of climate change and the related Anthropocene era, made by massive server farms required to maintain (and of course extract data from) their sites.
According to ABI Research, by the end of 2024, there will be 5709 ‘public data centres’, or server farms, worldwide – 5186 colocation sites and 523 hyperscale sites. Asia-Pacific currently has the highest concentration of new sites, followed by North America then Europe. Their research estimates there will be 8378 data centres/server farms in operation by 2030.
These massive facilities, sometimes deceptively called ‘public data centres’ (they may store ‘public data’ but are almost exclusively owned privately/corporately), harvest all of our data, serve all of our entertainment ‘needs’, as well as power and cool the computing and Internet based architecture we have allowed our lives to, still increasingly, revolve around.
While different ‘experts’ have differing opinions on what exactly constitutes a hyperscale data centre, a server farm, Synergy Research, which tracks the data centre market, uses ‘scale of business criteria’. They measure facilities in tens of thousands of servers.
The shift in where most sector market growth is currently, according to Synergy Research, is due to previously built and established centres, with other geographical locations 'simply' catching up. In 2019, they based then most recent research on analysis of the data centre footprint of the 20 largest Internet and Cloud companies. The usual suspects, Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Meta/Facebook, dominated market shares, but other, perceived as ‘smaller’ operators, like X/Twitter, eBay, Alibaba and Baidu, were there too.
While most of the hyperscale facilities were then in the US,the highest rates of growth were in Asia-Pacific and Europe. China, Japan, the UK, Germany and Australia accounted for 32% of the total.
Amazon and Microsoft launched more than half of all new data centres to that year. Google and Alibaba were the next most active companies. regardless of geographical location, for new server farms. They remain so.
In 2022, anthropologist Steven Gonzalez Monserrate drew upon five years of ethnographic field work in server farms, to illustrate their environmental impact, and published a damning report. The case study, entitled ‘The Cloud is Material: The Environmental Impacts of Computation and Data Storage’ makes clear the environmental cost of ubiquitous computing (and make no mistake, your smart devices, your phones are ‘computers’). It notes, by way of lead-in:
‘Whatever your query, desire or purpose, the Internet provides, and all of the complexity of everything from unboxing videos to do-it-yourself blogs are contained within infinitely complex strings of bits. As they travel across time and space at the speed of light, beneath our oceans in fibre optic cables thinner than human hairs, these dense packets of information, instructions for pixels or characters or frames encoded in ones and zeros, unravel to create the digital veneer before you now…(they)…are a point of entry into an ethereal realm that many call the ‘Cloud’.
While in technical parlance the ‘Cloud’ might refer to the pooling of resources over a network, in popular culture ‘Cloud’ has come to signify and encompass the full gamut of infrastructures that make online activity possible, everything from Instagram to Hulu to Google Drive…its inner workings…(are)…largely mysterious to the general public…however formless or ethereal they may appear to be,…(they)…are in fact made of matter, the Cloud of the digital is relentlessly material.
To get to the matter of the Cloud we must unravel the coils of coaxial cables, fibre optic tubes, cellular towers, air conditioners, power distribution units, transformers, water pipes, computer servers and more. We must attend to its material flows of electricity, water, air, heat, metals, and rare earth elements that undergird our digital lives. In this way, the Cloud is not only material…it is also an ecological force. As it continues to expand, its environmental impact increases, even as the engineers, technicians and executives behind its infrastructures strive to balance profitability with sustainability. Nowhere is this dilemma more visible than in the walls of the infrastructures, where the content…lives: the factory-libraries where data is stored and computational power is pooled.’
Monserrate’s research found that ‘the Cloud’ Has a greater carbon footprint than the entire airline industry. A single data centre can consume electricity to the equivalent of 50,000 homes. Data centres collectively devour more energy than some nation states.
As the research has it, ‘the Cloud’ is a ‘carbonivore’. It is also very thirsty.
Server farms are irrigated. Chilled water is pushed through server racks to cool facilities, liquid being a superior convective agent to air.
Shifting from cooling air to cooling water may be sold as an attempt to reduce carbon footprints but it comes at other environmental costs. Areas where server farms are located are increasingly strained for water resources, suffering shortages and power outages as direct results of data centre water usage.
Whilst resource usage data, ironically, is often difficult to obtain from corporate entities managing server farms, the US National Security Agency found that just one centre, the Utah Data Centre, located in Bluffdale, Utah, guzzles seven million gallons of water daily in order to operate.
Corporate pledges, responding to this type of impact on ‘water-stressed communities‘, made by how they do business,to invest in water infrastructure and community resources, to enhance ‘water stewardship’ and ‘water security’ may seem laudable, in this light. They are not.
Not only are they not enforceable, given the continuing explosive growth of data storage infrastructures (expected to triple over the next decade), they also do not appear feasible. As with so much it does and did, while its founders and proponents moved fast and broke things, we entrust, have entrusted, still entrust ‘Big Tech' with its own regulation.
When we consider the companies financial ties to the fossil fuel industry and failure to meet the deadlines of previous pledges to reduce carbon emissions or other waste, this does not bode well.
According to the ‘Emissions Gap Report’, authored by the United Nations Environment Programme, global temperatures are conservatively projected to rise by 2.7°C by the end of the century.
Planetary heating will melt glaciers and raise sea levels. This will result in salinisation of freshwater supplies, proliferation of pathogen growth in stagnant water reservoirs and the intensification of ongoing processes of desertification. In turn this will create near ubiquitous conditions of water scarcity by 2040, if companies and governments fail to intensify their efforts to genuinely curb emissions.
Tipping points and compound cascading crises loom.
They scream at us. Not just through the material impact of ‘intangible’ uses but through the very devices used to navigate them, around which so many of us structure our lives, our day-to-day, minute to minute actions and choices.
Since the first ‘smart’ phone hit markets in 2007, to 2022, over seven billion devices of the sort had been manufactured. Their life spans average less than two years, a consequence of designed obsolescence as increased profit seeking.
Meanwhile, the material and political conditions of their manufacture, as well as the resources required for their production, are deliberately obscured. Under gruelling conditions, miners tirelessly plumb the earth for the rare metals required to make information and communications technology devices.
Then, in vast factories, located where labour can be procured cheapest and legal protections for workers are scant, ‘smart’ phones are assembled and shipped to consumers. To be discarded in a matter of months, to end up in e-waste graveyards.
The rare earth metals and other components in them, many of which are toxic and contain radioactive elements, take millennia to decay. The refuse of your digital fix is ecologically transformative. It is estimated that less than sixteen percent of the tonnes of e-waste generated annually is recycled.
These ecological dynamics, moving through all of our lives, every moment of every day, are not entirely a consequence of corporate malfeasance, government neglect or even design limits. Somewhere, we gave our consent, we deferred agancy.
They are the result of human practises and choices - not just among corporations and government as proxies - the practises, choices and responsibilities of individuals and communities of them.
Like any aspect of culture, what we choose to do with technology and how we do it, including how we respond to its apparently inherent ecological impacts, are not predetermined or unchangeable. Like any aspect of culture, they are mutable.
Not only that, as Shoshanna Zuboff has it, changing it/them, choosing to act differently towards them, in spite of their seeming inevitability or ubiquity, which they depend upon, is a necessary act of resistance, amid the fight for human agency at the frontier of new power.
Resistance to the Venn diagram, where the nexus of climate change (along with its interlinked crises) and surveillance capitalism meet, new power and old power, server farm and land ownership, can seem futile. It's a feature, not a glitch, in prevailing systems.
How we respond to awareness of it will determine humankind’s future, on the only planet we have to sustain it.
Just as this detour, around hutting and networking to facilitate it, into server farms and their ecological impact and ultimately arriving at the fight for human agency, maps political choices inherent in our daily lives in what may seem unlikely congruences to some, so too may be where it is headed.
As a response to climate and ecological crises, in common with Tiny Houses and food forests, ‘hutting’ and ‘allotments’, or community gardens, have the same potential to offer genuinely democratic, pardon the puns, grassroots, ground up solutions to these top-down created issues. But only without or avoiding engagement with the inculcated convenience and ubiquity of prevailing systems. It can seem a big ask.
Charlie Ellis provides good context for the politicised nature of allotments and community gardens, here. It draws heavily on the writings of anarchist thinker Colin Ward and Paul Hirst, who promoted associative democracy. Ellis notes:
‘Ward and Hirst’s thought exemplifies the antithesis in British socialism, between belief and the efficacy of the state and concern about its growth. Ward viewed the post war era as one in which British socialism took ‘the wrong road’ and attempted to ‘bypass’ the ‘multitude of local initiatives’ in favour of ‘the conquest of the power of the state’.
For Hirst, the aim of the left should be to ‘devolve activities from the state to civil society as far as is possible’. This echoes Ward’s distinction, outlined in ‘Anarchy in Action’ (1973), between ‘the tradition of fraternal and autonomous associations springing up from below’ as opposed to ‘authoritarian institutions directed from above’.
Ward was an advocate of communal ownership and ‘self-managed’ organisation of as many features of our lives as possible. As…reflected in an essay on Patrick Geddes, Ward was ‘absorbed by the ways in which people use, manipulate and shape their environment’. For Ward, allotments were seeds of an alternative form of social organisation, evidence that anarchist principles were ever alive and prescient… (stating) … ‘A society which organises itself without authority, is always in existence, like a seed beneath the snow, buried under the weight of the state.’
What is true here, of allotments, is even more so of hutting, tiny houses, food forests and access/Access to land generally. To ‘the weight of the state’ we must also add land ownership, corporations and surveillance capitalism.
Whilst you, dear earnest reader, siphon your way through this latest information dump, as intimated elsewhere in this blog, reading between the lines will yield far more productive and informative results. There's only so much holding of hands can be done, before you need them to take matters into for yourself.
The following links may also help:
https://www.woodlands.co.uk/owning-a-wood/woodlands-and-planning-legislation/
https://www.communitywoods.org/woodland-crofts
https://woodlandcrofts.org/