Entering the petite Festival Park the other evening, I saw a fox slink away into the undergrowth, and wondered what wonders laid beneath that brush. I also wondered at how an ecosystem like Festival Park establishes itself, and settles into a healthy living system. As I jogged through the park, I stopped jogging, and started listening. It was the twilight hour, where there was more darkness in the sky than light, but just enough light to make out silhouettes of birds and beasts, and bats. I listened to the dusk chorus of small birds reverberate around the circus of tall trees, and I thought to myself, What a magical place! I saw bats flitting quickly above my head in and out of the treeline. I even imagined that in those dark brooding ponds, one almost a marsh now, there is a multiculturalism of biodiversity, and of life in all its fascinating forms.
I also wondered if the park would then become a target for developers, who see nothing of what I see, who see this 'park' as simply a park from a very limited perspective, that's to say, a space to walk your dog, a space to walk through or have a chat, but emphatically a human-centred space that humans do not use. And if humans do not use it, then what's the point?
I also wondered if the park would then become a target for developers, who see nothing of what I see, who see this 'park' as simply a park from a very limited perspective, that's to say, a space to walk your dog, a space to walk through or have a chat, but emphatically a human-centred space that humans do not use. And if humans do not use it, then what's the point?
But of course, this park does not belong to us humans. It belongs to the wood pigeons, the magpies, the pipistrelle bats and fiery foxes, the indigenous life-forms who have made it their home. It belongs to the birch trees, the couch grass, the irises and orchids, the insects and the gulls that have grown up here, that use this space as a shelter, a feeding station, a place to communicate and coordinate, a place to breathe and live. To these creatures this space is home in the deepest most profound way.
Development looms however. And nothing is ever safe from the claws of developers who see little of the microcosm that exists here, and its benefit not just unto itself but to all who come into contact with it.
Development looms however. And nothing is ever safe from the claws of developers who see little of the microcosm that exists here, and its benefit not just unto itself but to all who come into contact with it.
The cost of progress - the cost of control - is that we have now reached a point where we are out of control. Like an avalanche, humans can no longer control their direction. They think they can, but they can't. What is happening in effect is that the avalanche is occasionally redirected in a slightly different direction, but the end point is the same: down, until it hits a wall, or slumps into the earth, spent.
'Build bridges not walls', read the banner across the Clyde the other day for Trump's presidential inauguration.
How about we just stop building altogether?
It's the building that has caused us to lose control.
Construction is simply the more sinister side of destruction. It conceals its destruction beneath a veneer of decor and pebble dash, beneath a skin of glass and steel, beneath its vampiric sucking of the earth's energies. Beneath banners that tell us how considerate construction companies are...
But construction is rarely considerate, at least in the man-made world where his homes are not nests, but closets and filing cabinets that impact and press down upon the earth.
The paradox reveals the path.
No progress, no control. No construction.
Just being natural. Just natural being.
Using what nature provides without synthesizing it or chemicalizing it, without leeching, and bleaching the earth with our waste.
It is to this end that I shall build a home made of light...
Save our wild spaces and you save the world.
