Planet and PEOPLE

This letter comments in detail on the minutes of the May and June 2023 meetings, published in July. Dear John Nicholson (Secretary) Thank you for sending the latest WLECC minutes. I am responding to these by way of an open letter because of your failure to acknowledge or record receipt of previous communications over more Continue reading

First let’s face up to the bad news, news I think we already know even as we try to sweep it under a carpet of silence, run away, and deny it all.  But it’s not the end of the story.  Everything us impermanent as so is this. I have said before that the ‘Great Reset’ Continue reading

We elect politicians to represent us, and to hold the over-mighty and over-wealthy to account.   It is a system with ancient origins in the local assemblies held by all northern European peoples – the Norse ‘Thing’, the Danish ‘Wapentake’, the Anglo-Saxon ‘Hundred’, and their Gaelic equivalents.    Every township, every village and town once Continue reading

It’s time to talk about ‘re-wilding’. The separation of people from nature, the ‘pretence that removing humans from an area will make nature ‘Year Zero’ fascism that pretends that humans can be removed from an ecosystem. There are no truly wild places on the planet. Everywhere is invaded by litter, microplastics, radiofrequency radiation, CO2, invasive Continue reading

THis Latin phrase comes from the poet Juvenal, about 100 BCE. (Satire VI, lines 347–348). It means, who guards the guards themselves?  Who administers the administrators?  Who holds the authorities accountable? It’s a very good question, and it arises from the idea of ‘power over’ I looked at previously.   Who has power over those Continue reading

Let’s explore the idea of ‘power over’ other people and nature.   All power derives from fear – fear of violence from other people, and fear of ‘nature’, wild, unpredictable and uncontrollable:  wild beasts, disease, so-called  ‘Acts of God’. We are told that violence and destruction are ‘human nature’.   That we are all separate, competing Continue reading

Water is just two hydrogen atoms plus one oxygen, two common gases which can be split apart by passing an electrical current through, but with extraordinary properties. It exists in an extraordinary variety of forms, from solid ice, through various kinds of snow and hail, to liquid and vapour. Seen from space the Earth is Continue reading

Let’s get rid of the Highland Council.   The Highland Council is so utterly awful it is now hard to see any redeeming qualities at all.   It is not local at all, covering a third of mainland Scotland, an area the size of the whole of Wales.  It is an urban city council for Continue reading

Burns’s Scotland was ‘bought and sold for English gold’. Today, England itself is bought and sold, but the gold these days is Russian, Chinese and above all, American. And Scotland’s ‘resources’ are simply part of the deal. Dark money has been flooding into London, and Westminster (on both sides of the House of Commons) seems Continue reading

What can we do? It can seem pretty hopeless.   The international plutocrats have already taken over.  They rule us through Project Fear. A deep, neofascist agenda, based on the ‘survival of the nastiest’ ideology, seems to have infected our entire politics and society.  We have been softened up to accept more and more draconian totalitarianism.  Continue reading