Because of the ocean I carried nothing with which I could preserve your question, that crowded evening in Montenegro. I have forgotten now the exact order of our words but it doesn’t matter. The question caught in the salt heat water of the night and stained. What do you do with it then, your privilege? you asked, black eyes flickering. I put down my glass. * My grandparents arrived to a cold country with a suitcase each and a pocket full of Ukraine’s soil. Brown, brown, brown – suitcase, soil, skin. My branches grew out and up under unspoken skies of inherited oppression. Centuries of violenc ..read more

The Fowlers’ Complaint I first came across ‘The Fowlers’ Complaint’ in A Ballad History of England, written in 1979 by my late mentor Roy Palmer. Roy was a teacher, folklorist and singer from the Midlands, who dedicated his life to hunting out old folk songs and using them to teach radical British history. Importantly he was also an experienced performer which set him apart from most other collectors who approached the material from a more cerebral angle. This song – also known as ‘The Powtes Complaint’ – dates from 1611, and describes the draining and enclosure of the Fens in the east of Engl ..read more

There is a field in Wisconsin, in the United States, that I have been learning for the last ten years. For generations before I met it, the field was mowed. Multiple times. Multiple years. Over and over again. Eight years ago the mowing stopped. What happens to a field left to its own rhythms, surrounded by wood that used to be logged and now isn’t? Every season I write down the flowers, the grasses, the saplings that move up through the soil. Here are bergamot and amaranth. And here are prairie sunflowers and red clover. Box elder and right there, oh god right there, the smallest of oak. Fi ..read more

I first read about the concept of the commons in Garrett Hardin’s ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’ (1968). ‘Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all’, he argued, claiming tragedy was unavoidable without privatisation or autocratic rule. His viewpoint chimed so completely with the capitalist project, and became so widely accepted, that today the title sounds almost  tautological. It is one of the most cited scientific papers of all time.  ‘That bullshitter’, says Silvia Federici when I bring up Hardin’s name. Now in her eighties, she has spent her career arguing that the true tragedy is th ..read more

Within my mouth you have engaoled my tongue, Doubly portcullised with my teeth and lips – William Shakespeare, The Life and Death of King Richard the Second When I walked in the fields and woods of home my language always flowed. Dordi chavi, dik the shushis prasteren adoey. ‘Cor mate, look at the rabbits running there.’ Parnyin tadivvus. ‘Raining today.’ Gavver mush jellen up akai. ‘Policeman walking up here.’ Kakker chavi, don’t be dinlo. ‘Quiet mate, don’t be stupid.’ Yaris and baulomas, kushti. ‘Egg and bacon, nice.’ I was cagey about talking Romani, because in the pubs and shops of ho ..read more

Editorial: the Living Land Last year, Global Witness reported that 1,910 land defenders were murdered in the past decade, the equivalent of one person every other day. The vast majority of these killings occurred in Latin America, and over a third of the victims were Indigenous – despite the fact that Indigenous people comprise only 5% of the world’s population. What they gave their lives for – ‘land’ – seems such a simple word, often used with no thought to its meaning. Land is the ground beneath our feet, but it is so much more than that, and to act in its defence is to fight for many things ..read more

EcoBody is a poetry collective collaboratively investigating our responses to chosen themes. We are poets, dancers, wild swimmers, mothers and grandmothers. We write in landscapes: in a wild garden behind a forge, beside streams and rivers, walking the waterlogged ground of the ancient Pevensey Levels on the Sussex coast. Our first project was Wetland EcoBody, six poems derived from time spent together on the Levels. ‘Accord’ was a way to think differently about ecosystems coming together, human and non-human. Instead of compromise, we thought about finding accord, each approaching the concept ..read more

Stories with numbers If you’re brought up in science and want to tell stories, one problem you face is numbers. There’s a theoretical objection –that some things just cannot be counted –and a practical one – that big numbers won’t land. Birds, for example, are countable, but what are a billion birds like? ‘A billion’ is an easy piece of mental furniture, useful for being outraged by rich people on social media. The zeroes go plink plunk plonk, it doesn’t matter how many there are.  But I had been listening to stories of isotopes with half-lives in the billions of years. It was 2005; I was ..read more

By the time I get in my car and drive south, the Utah monolith is already gone. When I tell people that I am going to look for it anyway, they are confused. But the monolith doesn’t exist anymore, they say. I tell them that’s why I want to find it. The monolith was first spotted in a remote red rock canyon in southern Utah by a team of biologists counting bighorn sheep. Following a gleam in the rock, they found a sculpted metal beam, taller than a person and about as wide, bolted to the floor of a slot canyon. There was no signage, no clue as to how or why this piece of art – if indeed that’s ..read more

I watched my niece play a game a few days ago in a noisy arcade, the object being to lasso cows on a video screen, watched by a chorus of cowboys. If you missed, the cows would laugh at you. But if you got your rope around the animal’s neck, the onlookers would cheer and wave their hats while the cow herself evidenced pain: bulging tongue, crossed eyes. I found myself rooting for the cows and thinking about all the millions of little ways this culture puts itself at arm’s length, or rope’s length, from the animals with whom we share the Earth. Agriculture is part of it, yes, but so is represen ..read more