Ascending!

Welcome back dear readers! Many apologies for the missing blog-life since July, but life took over somewhat. For any who don’t know, I applied for a job as Coordinator for the St Helena National Trust’s ‘Community Forests Project’. And got it! So that’s three years back on the magical isle. I am thrilled about the work and of course some trepidations about what it will mean to live in such an isolated place for three cycles of the seasons. But it feels very right and full of rich potential for both myself personally, and for the project aims of native habitat restoration along with much education, engagement and training of local folks in conservation ways.

Beach Bliss!

After being offered the job at the end of September it suddenly became clear that there were no places on the ship from Cape Town until 2014, so there was a mad rush to try and get to the island via the only other route: a military flight to Ascension Island, just south of the equator, and catch the ship from there for the remaining 700 miles. So everything has been somewhat rushed, getting back from a rich and wonderful month in the US mid October and then getting the last possible flight to Ascension a week later. As it turns out the storms delayed the flight by 24hrs, so I had a slightly surreal stop over at an RAF base, flouncing around in my new lime-green crocs and Mohawk amidst the boys in blue. Now one would think this might be some sort of uniform-fetish fantasy, but the reality was that I haven’t felt such a sense of repression and suppressed spirit since my long-gone teen days as a born-again Christian. Deeply unsexy and actually quite shocking to briefly experience a whole culture based on personal disempowerment and conformity.

Military Bases: not so sexy…

So here I am on this spectacular, rather bizarre island known as Ascension for five days of transit. Somehow when the beach cards got handed out in the South Atlantic, Ascension got ALL the trump cards and St Helena got the joker. Truly glorious golden shell sands that swathe great bays, punctured by demonic eruptions of black-purple lava eroded into monstrosities to give Hieronymus a run for his money. Yup, just like sibling Helena, Ascension is just one big volcano poking his young-pup head above the great ocean only a million or so years ago. So big sis Helena is way older, clocking up 8 million years since her last big blow. So whilst she got swathed by evolution in an incredible diversity of unique plants, insects and birds, Ascension only had to chance to develop a few mosses and ferns before we came along and trashed the whole process.

You’ll have to imagine the blue skies…

Cinder cones and lava flows

But the greatest tragedy for the island was his sea birds, which once must have been deafening in their millions. All the coastal areas are dotted every few meters with rock outcrops covered in creamy-grey fossilised guano where the feathered minions once perched. First came the rats, then like the old lady who swallowed a fly, they brought the cats to catch the rats, but of course they went feral and within decades the outrageous abundance of bird life was clawed off the island. Serendipity gifted a tiny island where pussy couldn’t get to, sun-dazzling in bird-crap-cream like some great frosted sea-muffin, so we still have the endemic frigate bird with us, sweeping round the coast with their menacing pterodactyl-like silhouette as they sweep down to ponce bait off their hard-fishing neighbours. But all is not lost. Heroic efforts in the Naughties put paid to the bad cats and ever so slowly them birdies are coming back. I spent a day hiking out to the sea-muffin, through jaw-dropping volcanic landscapes, and sat amongst an adorable colony of booby couples (it’s a gannet-like bird…) squawking and squabbling like any over-crowded neighbourhood, and tried to imagine these black wastes without them. Desolate. And yet that is what it was like here just ten years ago. There was something thrilling about experiencing with all my senses: their waddling beauty; raucous noise; whiffy fishy; – sensually filled with life thriving as a result of our species’ work to restore abundance and not exploit and consume it. I felt hope.

Traces of lost birdies…

Booby couple ;0)

Guano Muffin

And I haven’t even mentioned the booming turtle population: every beach covered in the bomb-cratered nests of an current estimated 6000 reptilian ladies. And in the midst of all this stark primeval nature is of course the enormous US air base. The military have made mince-meat of one side of the island. The great runway of course, but also hacking off the tops of huge cinder-cones and erupting weird golf-ball radars, with enormous snooping aerials trapezing across the landscape. It was impossible not to be impressed by the achievements of this industrial-military culture of ours, but I sent out the prayers that one day we might get over ourselves and direct this unfathomable enormity of resource, energy, ingenuity and power to goals such as sustainability, human dignity and a cherishing of life, in all her miraculous forms.

Check out the turtle nests: all quiet at this time of year ;0(

The Other Reality

Maybe it has been no coincidence that right now I am reading one of the most honest and powerful books I’ve ever read about the genocide and ecocide that has followed, and continues to follow, every encounter between our Western ‘civilisation’ and any other form of life or culture on the planet. How at every brutalising step this current insanity values production over life. And in our trauma of being involved in such a carnage, both globally, societally and personally, the overwhelming response has been denial: yup, what I really need to do this year is extend the house… or get more TV channels… or book that holiday… or get that promotion… or pay the mortgage… Check it out if you dare: ‘A Language Older than Words’ by Derrick Jensen.

Sorry to get heavy, but let’s face it, as the planet faces the greatest extinction crisis of its long and fecund career, and the majority of our own species lives in such abject poverty all they can fight for is survival, and as we start to unpick the last stitches of the ecosystems that provide our basic food and water… Maybe we need to get heavy. Derrick didn’t offer the solution, just the wake up call. I pressed the snooze button for years…