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HEADING FOR THE HILLS

Watershed

I have stood many times on the red rock by the river, deep in the win­ter shad­ows. The sun never touches the base of this Pri­o­rat val­ley dur­ing the short­est days of the year. It can be un­nerv­ingly quiet down there, but for the pulse of na­ture.

The hor­ri­ble truth is the human in­nate abil­ity to at­tune senses to that pulse has al­most been lost.

I might be there to breathe, to fathom, to be with my fam­ily away from stuff and non­sense, or to med­i­ta­tively, grate­fully, stuff my pock­ets with fir cones and twigs. They are free and plen­ti­ful. We use them to light the two wood-burn­ers that warm our farm­house.

The river­banks again bear the scars of a re­cent surge that has moved rocks and wrapped up­rooted veg­e­ta­tion high around the waists of the trees strong enough to hold on. The mul­ti­tude of tan and green cane stalks are splayed in all di­rec­tions. It is rain­ing hard again right now. The ran­dom force of na­ture will once more reap and re­mind.

What of this year? It has taken its toll, the dark­est year of reck­on­ing dur­ing my priv­i­leged life­time. That de­gree of priv­i­lege, my rel­a­tive se­cu­rity dur­ing sixty years on a sta­ble con­ti­nent, dis­tanced by decades or many kilo­me­tres from hor­ror sto­ries, height­ens the un­cer­tainty of now. I have no real idea and never had of how des­per­ate and dark life can be. No famine, no war, no earth­quakes. Do you?

So I stand on the rock and ask my­self - will the pan­demic be a cat­a­lyst for human re-eval­u­a­tion? Will it, in tan­dem with other, stark fun­da­men­tal facts of life and death, give worth to this un­nerv­ing time as a wa­ter­shed?

Wa­ter­shed. Noun. Cam­bridge dic­tio­nary de­f­i­n­i­tion - an event or pe­riod that is im­por­tant be­cause it rep­re­sents a big change in what or how peo­ple do or think about some­thing.

Pre-Covid it was be­com­ing nigh im­pos­si­ble to man­age the noise, the in­ces­sant bom­bard­ment of in­for­ma­tion and mis­in­for­ma­tion, the fudg­ing of the lines be­tween fact and fic­tion. I firmly be­lieve we were be­com­ing numb. The duvet over the head was prefer­able to try­ing to take any of it to heart, or head.

So, is this a wa­ter­shed? Are we all in this to­gether and will learn from it? Will we re­ally start to ques­tion and change? Or as we emerge in 2021 will it be busi­ness as usual, the world that was?

You may well be ask­ing where, sud­denly, all the money is com­ing from? And – hang on a minute - how is it pos­si­ble that the 2000+ dol­lar bil­lion­aires have grown con­sid­er­ably wealth­ier dur­ing the pan­demic?

We re­ally need to take our­selves to task on so many lev­els. Here’s a ran­dom one: What sane species would have as one of its key eco­nomic dri­vers - $100 bil­lion an­nu­ally and ris­ing – the man­u­fac­ture of ar­ma­ments, the means to kill one an­other?

But back to the pulse that I can barely feel. The real world is pop­u­lated by so many more be­ings than us hu­mans, liv­ing things that have so much to teach, are so de­serv­ing of our care and re­spect and on whom, ul­ti­mately, our col­lec­tive sur­vival de­pends.

How on Earth do we stop species loss? We are head­ing head­long for the sixth mass ex­tinc­tion on this planet and are wholly re­spon­si­ble.

At the most con­ser­v­a­tive es­ti­mates, dur­ing the months we have been liv­ing through the trauma of pan­demic, more than 10,000 other species have died out.

Yet sci­ence shows us, once again, what we are ca­pa­ble of when we put our minds to it. That needs to en­com­pass our hearts too.

So feel your pulse. You are alive and can stand up. Be ac­tive. May 2021 bring pos­i­tives, love for all life and rapid, fun­da­men­tal, sus­tain­ing pro­tec­tions and change.

Keep safe.

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