Columns (October 2009)
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Green Links
with Janis Irvine
Autumn is with us with all it has to offer: there can be fierce blustery winds and early morning frosts while the trees give us a fiery palette of yellows, oranges and reds. In the garden there are perennials to cut back and the vegetable plot may have spent plant growth to be cleared up and the ground made ready for another crop. All of this plant matter will, of course, go into the compost heap, and even the fallen leaves can be raked up and put in ventilated bags to rot down slowly and later used as a mulch or added in small doses to the compost bin where worms and bacteria are working away, largely unseen but producing a much-prized product.
This cycle of growing plants, composting the waste and then using the resultant rich matter to enrich the soil before planting starts again is what is known as permaculture. Nothing is wasted and the whole ecosystem benefits, including ourselves as we enjoy the beauty of the flowers we have grown or are sustained by our tasty home-grown fruit and vegetables. In addition, our growing of shrubs and flowers is beneficial to bees, butterflies and other insects that feed off their nectar. In turn, many of these insects pollinate the fruit and veg we have enjoyed.
However, as humans we produce a great deal of waste that does not break down to become beneficial components of our ecosystem. For instance, the sheer quantity of plastic goods which are a big part of our daily living and which have become such a problem when it comes to disposal. Much of this plastic waste will lie in landfill or be shipped out to become a disposal problem for other countries. If this were not bad enough, much of this plastic waste also lands up in our seas where it can cause great damage to the marine ecosystem.
Recently I visited some coastal villages in East Fife; most have a fishing heritage and their picturesque buildings hug steeply-descending lanes leading to ancient harbours. More often than not, amongst the sea kelp, shells and pieces of wood, a huge variety of plastic waste could be seen, including baler twine, drinks bottles and, oddly, a number of disposable cigarette lighters. The author, Robert MacFarlane, in his book “The Wild Places” describes his search for the truly wild places of Britain.
He speaks of walking through forest on the remote West coast of the Isle of Skye then dropping down to a cove “Lurid debris was everywhere ….. blue milk bottle crates, pitted cubical chunks of furniture foam, cigarette butts, bottle caps, aerosol canisters and Tetrapak cartons…… Even here, on this remote Atlantic-facing bay, evidence of damage was unmistakable, pollution inescapable and the autonomy of the land under threat.” He goes on to say “A minke whale washed up on the Normandy coast in 2002 was found to have nearly a ton of plastic packaging and shopping bags in its stomach”.
Most of us like to live in reasonably tidy homes, knowing that cleanliness is a pretty important part of keeping our families safe and well, and yet we are largely ambivalent about living conditions for the other creatures which share our planet. What has gone wrong? As long as man has lived on Earth he has lived in harmony with it, growing and harvesting and using the natural materials in his own locality to clothe himself and to provide shelter.
Apart from the odd midden containing, in the main, stone jars, iron pots and decaying leather shoes, there has been very little to show for the millennia of mankind’s presence. And yet 50 or 80 years of plastic waste has permeated the lands and seas of the entire Earth where it will stay for hundreds of years.
Caring for the Earth lies behind the Climate-change Day of Prayer being promoted by leaders of several denominations for 4th October. Organised by the Environmental Issues Network of Churches Together in Britain and Ireland, Christians are being encouraged to organize prayer events throughout Britain. In addition, the Archbishop of Canterbury has just launched a videocast urging viewers to sign up to the Church of England’s environmentally-themed online Advent calendar. In it, the Archbishop says that the answer to the problem of climate change and pollution is “in large measure, in our hands”. And he goes on, “It’s about our lifestyle; it’s about the ways we are prepared to go with the grain of God’s creation rather than fighting against it and trying all the time to overcome it”. I would add that it’s about permaculture.
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Rural Affairs
with Dagmar Winter
It’s Harvest time
How better to start than with a remark on the weather: After a fairly dry six months, July was rather wet and at some point in August it looked as though 2008 was going to repeat itself, with further heavy rain in early September, so for some it has been a stop-start harvest.
Few have been lucky making hay, but fortunately silage has been invented to help us out in our climate. Silage is the most common way for grass to be conserved as winter fodder but interestingly, despite first being introduced in the UK in the 1880s, it's only in the 1970s that silage really took off in the UK.
So what is silage? It's the greener and damper version of hay. Requiring less dry and sunny weather, the grass can be cut when it is younger and leafier and so has a higher feed content. It sounds easy but with the bales wrapped in polythene there's a great deal more to it to get the fermentation right! Farmers with wheat and barley in store will hope that the price may lift from its current dismal level, a real worry for many. While fertilizer prices have gone up, yields have been mainly average. Harvest leads us to think of arable farming, but there is also the livestock harvest. Beef prices have been encouraging and lamb prices at the local mart have been good. They need to be in order to give farmers a chance to recover from the recent lean years – you need a long-term view in farming.
Meanwhile, with the crisis in the dairy sector continuing, let's not forget our milk. Most of us will have become aware of problems when Dairy Farmers of Britain (including the dairy in Blaydon) went into receivership. This now appears to have been in no small way the result of bad management of DFB. However, the difficulties go much deeper: the UK dairy industry has almost halved to 17,060 farmers in the last decade against a background of low milk prices. Farmers are still leaving the industry at a rate of 14 a week. The resulting UK shortfall of £1.46 billion litres of milk last year prompted unprecedented levels of imports. This makes the issue of food security in the dairy sector a very live one indeed, since the UK can no longer meet its own 18m litres a day requirement.
FOOD 2030 and FOOD SECURITY
At Harvest, we need to think of our farmers. While not nearly as many people are employed in agriculture as in decades gone by, farming continues to make a huge contribution to our rural economy and to our way of life. In 2008 it contributed approximately £6.8 billion to the UK economy. It uses around three quarters of this country's land area, and quite simply and most importantly, it puts food on our tables. Food security, which until very recently was maligned as a fringe interest, has shot to the top of the agenda.
Defra (The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs) has launched an online discussion called Food 2030 (go to www.defra.gov.uk/food2030). Food 2030 looks both at the food we produce and consume in the UK, and how global food production can be increased in a sustainable way. The main challenges facing us are described as a rising population (another 2 – 3 billion people in the next 50 years), diminishing natural resources and climate change. Alongside these, diet-related ill health continues to put a burden on the economy and society. The online forum will stay open until 16th October and as a 'Harvest-tide discipline' I suggest you might like to have a look at the issues raised there and also contribute to the online discussion "Give us today our daily bread..." What will we and our children associate with this petition from the Lord's Prayer in 2030?
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View from the Lantern
with Canon Sydney Connolly
It’s a great shame, what has happened to SPCK in recent years. Founded in 1698, The Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, soon established itself at the heart of the Church of England. Many dioceses had a bookshop, where you could not only browse through a whole range of theological books, you could also order candles, wafers, communion wine, service books, and so much more. It was possible, every now and then, to pick up a few delicious bits of ecclesiastical gossip! The Newcastle shop, its managers and staff, were all held in great affection by laypeople and clergy alike. So it was sad when, fairly recently, it all fell apart, after many twists and turns of fortune.
I picked up the one and only prize I’ve ever received (apart from the odd bottle of wine in church fairs!) under the sponsorship of SPCK. It was more than 30 years ago, when I was a curate. At that time, in order to sell books in places other than bookshops, you had to become a Book Agent, which I did. SPCK, along with others, sponsored “Christian Book Weeks” in parishes. With the help of some splendid laypeople, we set up a week-long sale of new theological books, provided by SPCK on a “sale-or return” basis. We had great fun, and at the end of it I was presented with a prize – a book, of course – for our efforts. I still have it: The Lion Handbook to the Bible.
Many years later, I entered into another partnership with SPCK. This time, it was all to do with the “Bray Library”. The Revd. Dr. Thomas Bray (1656 – 1730) had the vision to establish a theological lending library in every deanery in England and Wales. He later did much the same thing in America. Eventually SPCK set up a scheme under his name, whereby parishes could buy books at reduced prices in order to promote the reading of theological books by small groups within the parish. It represented good value for money, and provided an excellent environment for discussion and debate.
Have you discovered the magnificent “Lit and Phil” Library in Westgate Road? The Society was established in 1793, and the building was opened in 1825. Women were first admitted as members in 1804. It has a collection of over 150,000 books and, rather surprisingly, 7,000 CDs and 10,000 LPs. You can go in for free and browse or read the newspapers and magazines, but if you want to take books out, you have to subscribe to become a member.
Did you know that the first library available for the use of the general public was in the Cathedral in the 16th century – when it was St Nicholas’ Parish Church? There are records indicating that in 1677, a Curate of St Nicholas (the Revd. William Nicholson) was librarian, with a salary of £3 per year. Almost 60 years later, Dr. Robert Thomlinson, Rector of Whickham, told the Mayor of Newcastle, Walter Blackett, that he was going to leave his library to St Nicholas’ Church. He was as good as his word, and eventually the library opened to the public in 1741. Sir Walter Blackett endowed it with £25 a year towards the librarian’s salary, and £5 to be spent on the purchase of books. When Robert Thomlinson died in 1748 there were over 7,000 books in the library. Most of the volumes were handed over to the public library in 1885, for safekeeping.
Newcastle Public Library, re-opened this year after a massive and impressive rebuilding programme, now houses the Thomlinson Library, where the volumes are kept in strictly controlled conditions to preserve the books for many years to come. A small exhibition telling the story of Thomlinson’s Library can be found in the Cathedral, together with a leaflet with some more detailed information.
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