In 1994 the American eco-literacy pioneer David Orr published Earth in Mind: on education, environment, and the human prospect, a collection of essays that revolve around his own troubling realisation, as a lifelong lecturer and academic, that the Higher Education knowledge economy of his day was proliferating in close step with a global ecological collapse…

During a live-streamed talk for Donut Day 2023 economist Kate Raeworth speaks of how those of us living and working within academia are used to thinking carefully and critically with words. “Meanwhile” Raeworth observes, “images slip in quietly through our eyes, taking up residence in the back of our brains”. Pulling out a length of…

Where else does this begin? Perhaps here, in April 2019. On a sunny morning in West London, where a few thousand of us fill the slow lane of the A4. It’s a month since this ‘March for Life’ set out from Land’s End, two months since a local Greenham Common veteran, Jackie Dash, first mooted…

Plumstead station, summer 2021. It’s around 1am and a full moon has just cleared the next door rooves. We’ve been here for two hours, waiting to be processed. We lean or squat or sit against the low station wall, each of us facing our Arresting Officer. Every twenty minutes or so we all shuffle a…

In autumn 2012 I first met up with Crisis Forum in person at their inaugural forum Avoiding Climate Change Violence. After two days manning a graphic literature table at a small press fair in Conway Hall, I finally left that work to others and headed across town to St Ethelburga’s, a little bombed-out church nestled between…

In 2010 I joined Crisis Forum, an email discussion loop initiated by genocide scholar Mark Levene and friends. Coming into being shortly before the onset of corporate social media, Crisis Forum offered a simple communal space for genocide, climate, and human ecology researchers to reflect together on what can be done to avert industrial modernity’s…

An Open Letter to Cornwall Council Dear Cornwall Council, This letter concerns the government-appointed Chair of Cornwall Council’s Economic Forum, Lord John Hutton, a man strongly linked to Israel’s state-owned arms contractor Rafael Advanced Defence Systems Ltd, as a director of its UK subsidiary Pearson Engineering. As has been widely reported Rafael, itself owned and…

On depth education and active listening: an excerpt from a 2023 essay A Compass for Survival: universities, ecological collapse and depth education, lightly edited here for our first Eco-Cit archive, Hyphae #1. The predicament which Ecological Citizenship has set out to address is commonly spoken of as ‘a climate and ecological crisis’, a phrase which…

Notes from a Spirituality Ecology forum at St Ethelburga’s Centre for Peace and Reconciliation in April 2016. St Ethelburga’s is a small 12th Century church nestled among the looming steel and glass towers of London’s financial centre. The original church was all but destroyed by the IRA’s Bishopsgate bombing in 1993. In response to this act of…

October 2023. As storm Ciaran approaches landfall we gather for an Ecological Citizenship reading group. What happens next opens into a reflection on how living through a pandemic led me to begin writing formal haiku. Falmouth so quiet a dunnock’s take-off startles the dry leaflitter We open with a passage by John Michael Greer that…