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I've taken a long break from blogging - over-long. Two good reasons - the birth of my son, Eshan, and a period of intense work with Carnegie UK Trust establishing a rural resilience-building community of practice. I will return to these topics later.

In the meantime, I've been invited to contribute to a potentially powerful new open learning initiative focussed on climate change. Here's a sample...

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Roots of Resilience - how can I connect with my place’s deeper story to ground my work for community resilience?

Step narrative and Resources

Introduction:
Effective resilience work of the future may find its potency significantly enhanced if it can harness and recover indigenous intelligences and sensibilities of place – work that helps communities to connect with the cultural, linguistic and natural history of their places. This practice of aligning our rural development work with the natural flows of places represents a tuning into our human ecology. This step is a taste of the work of the Centre for Human Ecology (www.che.ac.uk) and an emerging movement of community resilience which seeks to connect technical adaptations and rationalistic attempts to induce ‘behaviour change’ with a transformative approach more deeply rooted in liberating the potential of our human spirit, by ensuring our feet and planted firmly in the ground.

How to do this step:
Read the narrative below, and then go for a walk of at least half an hour. Find somewhere to stop where it’s not too busy or noisy. A city park is as good as a country lane.

Bring the focus of your attention to your breath, and to the place where your feet touch the ground through your shoes (if you’re wearing them).

Slow your breath and allow yourself to take a five minute daydream into the history of the place you now stand. Start in the present, and work backwards – as far as you are able – gently conjuring a sense of how this place might have been in the past, and of the many human hands that have shaped it. Perhaps, at an almost incredulous stretch, you can imagine the first foragers arriving as the last ice age abated... or as continents collided? Pause briefly in that ancient spot, before moving forward through time again.

Allow images and feelings to arise that may help you to connect with the human creativity that has helped to shape this place over time, in response to different times, technologies and challenges. Allow yourself to feel on the brink of a new set of challenges that require us to tune as fully as we are able into the inherent resilience of this place and of human community at its best. Allow yourself to sense life’s self-regenerating capacity to break open narrow human-centredness. Gently begin to make the transition out of the daydream – take five more belly breaths. Lean forward, allowing gravity to inform your first step into a more resilient future. When you get home, take a risk to share something of your experience with a trusted friend.

Maybe they’d like to come along with you next time? Tomorrow, same time?

Narrative: Restoring resilience: remembering the roots
One language dies with its last speaker about every two weeks, taking with it the accumulated history and knowledge of that culture’s reciprocal relationship with the land
- Maurice Carder, quoted in Resurgence no. 250

Resilience is not a new concept. Many indigenous peoples have succeeded in living in healthy relationship with their territory across the larger part of humanity’s colonisation of our planet.
An indigenous perspective sees all creation as sacred. This is a worldview that doesn’t spell out a concept of ‘resilience’ because alignment with sustaining life’s rich diversity, being radically in tune with Nature, is the source wisdom of all indigenous knowing:

a quest for harmony between humans, the spirit, world, Nature and society… Indigenous and traditional peoples frequently view themselves as guardians and stewards of Nature… direct links with the land are fundamental, and obligations to maintain these connections form the core of individual and group identity
- Darrell Posey, ibid.

Indigenous peoples’ struggle for survival has led them to form powerful international movements that are, today, finding voice to communicate a consciousness of resilience to a dominating world culture that, in their eyes, has forgotten the essense of what it means to be alive:

“We are trying to save the knowledge that the forest and this planet are alive – to give it back to you who have lost the understanding”
- Bepkororoti Paiakan, a Kayapo chief from Brazil quoted in Resurgence, Ibid.

These movements have won a UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (2007) which now enshrines rights to “strengthen [indigenous peoples] distinctive spiritual and material relationship with their lands, territories, waters and coastal seas”.

Indigenous people are not just those living in far-off forests. The Scottish Crofters’ federation have proposed that Scottish Crofters be recognised as an indigenous people by the UN. They make the case that, like the Sami, crofters share a distinct cultural and linguistic connection to the land …

As a Gaelic speaker, Iain Crichton Smith was intensely aware of the recession in his native language and of the threat to that culture's well-being. In his book Towards the Human (1996) he says Gaelic must not be allowed to die:

To be an islander is to inhabit real space on a real earth.... He has his proverbs, his philosophies, the cemeteries and cradles of his hopes: his tasks and his loves: his language. Behind the judgment made on him by the bureaucrat is the idea that his world is in some way irrelevant…

if there is no Gaelic left, will not the islander live in a disappearing landscape, as an Englishman would if his language were slowly to die?
… If he were to wake one morning and look around him and see "hill" and not "cnoc," would he not be an expatriate of his own land? For we are born inside a language and see everything from within its parameters: it is not we who make language, it is language that makes us.

…To live is to be conscious of a history… the possibility of a future means that the children must grow up in a world that they recognise as being as important as any other ... It requires a government that is concerned for all its people including those who speak a language that they do not understand.
Crichton Smith (1996)

The connection between a people, a place, and a language might be said to be a deep driver of the Scottish land reform movement and the bedrock of a cultural resilience that is driving some of the most potent innovation toward rural sustainability in Britain today.

Building on our example, the vibrant cultural renaissance in the Highlands can be seen, as Alastair McIntosh suggests in his poem The Forge, as a creative response to the fear that central belt ‘bureaucrats’ will rationalise spending without appreciating that it is exactly the creative energy of Highland communities that is showing the rest of the UK how low carbon, culturally effervescing community-based resilience might look and feel:

The Forge
What is the point of land reform
so that remote communities
can be preserved
as threatened cultures
at a massive social cost
to the nation as a whole

… [we] stoke the glowing hearth anew to smelt and skim and pour
a precious shimmering stream refined by sense of place and ancient lore
… and hammer out the beauty, of the braided crofting way …
which is our greatest export, to this world that’s gone astray…
and that’s the point of land reform
in the politics
of today.
Alastair McIntosh, excerpt from ‘The Forge’,
pub. In The Crofter, No. 73, Dec. 2006, p. 5

It is perhaps easier for Highlanders to sense a connection to indigenous intelligences than those of us living in urban centres where the globalised supermarket has covered all traces of what's been before. However, wherever we live, we are all, in a sense, indigenous to a place, and our long family histories tell something of the story of degrees of alienation from these intelligences over decades, generations or centuries. Is there something alive in us that is able to reconnect to land, to place, and draw strength as we (re)build community resilience for the storms we sense growing ahead?