Rambling in the Heath

I promise I won’t reference Adele in this post.

I had a day off work today, and decided to explore Putney Heath. It’s not the most glamorous green space in London, but it’s probably the most interesting for me.

Unlike the more manicured ‘garden’ parks of Central London, or the rolling hills of Richmond Park, the Heath has a variety of ecosystems, including the often-maligned swamp. I love swamps. They’re smelly, squishy, and full of interesting chemistry and life. You really know you’re experiencing nature in a swamp.

The dark pools were studded with freshly cut stumps, which made an interesting juxtaposition against the skeletal reflections of trees…

I tiptoed and balanced my way through the swamp, and found a brushy field of pea flowers. I’m going to be honest, it was mostly brambles and really didn’t lend itself to photography, but I found a few creepy little guys hiding out.

I’m not sure if my lens-related attention was appreciated.

I found myself wishing for my old 100mm macro lens, because most of the interesting things I found were smaller than my little fingernail. Or, wouldn’t come anywhere near me, in the case of the bunnies and birds.

The only downside was the incessant drone of automobiles. There are major roads on all sides of the Heath, and it’s under the Heathrow flight path, so it’s not possible to escape the roar of internal combustion. Rumour has it you need to go further afield for that…

Someone hit play

The United Kingdom skipped a month. We collectively drew in a breath at the beginning of March, ready to exhale when warm returned and we could throw open windows, park jackets in cupboards and do all the things we hadn’t been doing since September.

And then it got colder. At first it was ‘bracing’, then it was news, then it was just cold. It wasn’t the bitter weather per se that was the problem, it’s that people expected it to disappear quickly. And so, in the mysterious dark space between expectation and reality, sixty million people paused for a month.

But now, a warm breeze blows. The days are longer and the street cafes are pushing bustling life into the outdoors, just as the trees are erupting with new leaves and blossoms. The release is palpable. Someone hit the play button. And I’m excited.

This picture’s not relevant. It’s a grab from a time lapse I took last year, and come to think of it, never did anything with… move along!

For the first time, I am facing a summer in the UK with a stable job, a big friendship network, and a long list of great things to do. Let’s start with work. This week, my role consisted of discussing cyborg brain tissue with an eminent researcher, seeking permission to fly an unmanned ‘drone’ helicopter, and on Friday, I’m getting presentation training at the National Theatre. Oh, and I’m planning an event about the end of the world. Not a bad way to spend my 9-5.

But then there’s extracurriculars. I’ve got trips to Italy and Germany pipelined, with question marks over Greece and Portugal. Add in the prospect of weekend trips to peaks for rock climbing, an intensive Kung Fu training weekend getaway, and another round of sustainability training with Green Steps, and I think I have all the ingredients for a memorable few months.

Oh, and did I mention that it’s warm? It’s warm.

Finally, something to share; today, New Zealand passed a marriage equality act. That’s cool, but not something I would routinely comment on. However, the video below captures what I think might be the most stirring moment I’ve seen in a house of parliament:

This has

some stunning footage in it. The intro sequence particularly gives a sense of the wildness of the Hawaiian winter…

Excellent stuff, Miller Best. People who dedicate themselves to long hours behind a lens, then staring at an edit suite, to deliver bite-sized chunks of action like this have my gratitude!

The future is a little bit broken

“The future is not what we expected it to be.” Mark Shayler, opening the RSA’s Redesigning the Future event, didn’t pull punches. “We’ve become lazy – we define ourselves by the ownership of products.”

I’m typing this on a 2009 MacBook Pro. The machine is almost indistinguishable from thousands of others, a metallic clone whose glowing white apple marks me as a ‘Mac person’ when I take it out in public. But there’s subtle evidence on its hard shell that this machine has shared some of the most important moments of my life.

See here, near the bottom right corner of the touch screen – chipped metal where I dropped the laptop onto the bitumen of a 24-hour McDonald’s carpark after a night of red-eye driving in remote North Queensland. Try the useless eject button, the dead DVD drive rarely an inconvenience but often a reminder of how technology is moving on – is there still a DVD in there? I’m not sure.

Mac vs PC, from 1996. Image: Flickr/Adam Crowe

And just now, while inspecting my companion of the past three years, I’ve noticed that two of the ‘feet’ are missing, opening small holes into the black-boxed interior, one revealing a sticker in a language I can’t read.

Could I cast this laptop aside in favour of a new one? Send it to join what Rich Gilbert labelled an “end of life centre,” where “a mountain of dead products wait to be collectively reprocessed”? Or, as Jonathan Chapman put it, a landfill that “is more of an orphanage than a graveyard, a place where most things could still work – a home for unwanted things.”

A landfill fire at Greensburg, US. Image: Flickr/Jon Person

At some point, this computer will stop working, or I’ll replace it. But what do I do with it then? Staggering percentages of the products we buy end up either gathering dust or in landfill. These objects are the manifestation of raw resources clawed from our environment, shipped, moulded, refined, designed and sold. The part of the object’s life that we see – the part it shares with us – is a fraction of the time from its inception to eventual disposal or, in some cases, recycling or repurposing.

I’m attached to this machine. It’s stamped indelibly with marks that are meaningful to me, and I’d be sad to see it go, even though I can resurrect its software perfectly on new hardware with Time Machine. But we are increasingly educated to value newness, the latest and largest and highest resolution. How is it possible for this consumer ethos to survive in a world where resource scarcity looms, the price of materials is rising, the world’s population and spending power is booming, and our ability to capture value from our immense waste stream is still so limited?

Jonathan Chapman summarised it succinctly. “The sustainability crisis is a crisis of perception, as much to do with the human condition as it is about plastic, metals and carbon dioxide.” I think a good place to start is to look at our own relationship with stuff. What do you buy? What do you value? What do you keep? What do you get rid of, and how? And what would you do if the cornucopia of goods available in the world today, available at the click of a button, dried up?

How might ‘you’ change if the stuff in your life was suddenly gone?

It never rains

I’ve not been particularly lucky when it comes to weather in the UK. One of the rainiest summers ever, and now a winter which doesn’t seem to want to end.

A corner seems to have been turned, though. Standing in the drizzle at the end of Exhibition Road this evening, I was relieved to note that the temperature seems to have tipped over into the double digits. And Sunday has a forecast maximum of 16C, which I don’t think I’ve seen for more than 6 months now. That’s practically t-shirt and board shorts weather. Right?

It was a good moment to take a snap of a dreamy looking Natural History Museum. Working in the Science Museum, and walking past the majestic facades of Albertopolis daily, I rarely stop to take them in.

Oh, and I’d really like to see Dispatch live. The vibe in this crowd looks fantastic. “I have seen the others, and I have discovered, that this fight is not worth fighting…”