Archive for ‘September, 2019’

Fighting for Mother Earth

“We, the children of nature, fight for Mother Earth” said the young Brazilian climate activist at the FridaysForFuture rally in Manhattan last week. Earlier, New York’s Peace Poets advised the large crowd of which I was part to make common cause with indigenous leaders, whose ancestors have been fighting for environmental justice for hundreds of years. It was with those thoughts in mind that I returned to Battery Park the following day, enjoying an exhilarating cycle across the Brooklyn Bridge to visit the Museum of the American Indian.

Swarm: what the bee said to the daffodil

Prior to the anthropocene, a daffodil’s message that it was ready to be pollinated might have drifted many miles, attracting thriving populations of bees and ladybirds from a wide neighbourhood. Today a flower’s range is likely to be restricted to a couple of hundred metres, as dirty air dampens their scent and mobile phone traffic messes up the subtle electronic signals that pollinators use to identify and map the right flowers to visit. This and so much more I learned at wonderful ‘Swarm: artists respond to the pollinator crisis’ exhibition at the little Vestry House Museum in Walthamstow this weekend.

Green Man 2019

Having the hills and mountains of Wales as a backdrop helps make Green Man the most beautiful of British music festivals, a visual winning card that was matched this year by a gorgeous programme of folk-influenced performers, surely the largest array of decent ales and ciders outside of a beer festival, and the ritual of burning the eponymous green man, taking with it to the skies hand-written messages of the festival-goers hopes and dreams.

Krankenhaus in Muncaster

This weekend’s British Sea Power curated Krankenhaus festival on the Cumbrian coast has been pure joy. Housed in a barn on the Muncaster Castle estate, it felt like a legal rave curated by a nature-loving art-school band. Where else would you get hear everything from folk to tree-people trance, alongside a reading from the poet laureate, late night DJ-ing from a snooker legend, and musically enhanced bingo from Japanese punk band?