A hand

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 glass-fronted corporate towers in the heart of financial district in Aldgate. All but destroyed by the IRA in 1993, the church’s old stone body was now repaired and reconsecrated as an ecumenical outreach project called St Ethelburga’s Centre for Reconciliation and Peace.

Joining Crisis Forum in person was a watershed. Among those speaking that day it was meeting Alastair Macintosh – Quaker activist, author of the celebrated Soil and Soul and founder of Strathclyde University’s centre for Radical Human Ecology – that I understood I’d landed in the conversation that now mattered to me.

At some point we must have been tasked with breaking into pairs because I found myself sitting head-to-head with a conservation biologist, each of us sharing an encounter with the natural world that had somehow touched us. This deceptively simple exercise is one I’ve observed the power of many times over now, but here at St Ethelburga’s was my first encounter with it.

The biologist spoke to me about his work in turtle conservation, somewhere in the Greek Islands. Each night he and his colleagues were sent out to watch the beaches where the mother turtles would come up from the sea to bury their eggs in the sand. The man told me how one night he lay on his belly, a few feet away from a turtle who’d crawled up onto the soft sand above the reach of the tide. As he watched, she began to scoop a hole in the sand with her flipper. He knew this was his cue to hurry back to the others, who’d then come to measure and document her cache. On this occasion, the man said, he did no such thing.

Instead, he remained there next to her under the stars as she dropped her eggs, one by one, into the freshly dug hole, then began to scoop the loose sand back over them. He told me how as he lay there watching the turtle at her work, he realised with a kind of shock that her flipper was of course a hand. This obvious truth, he said, landed in him as a sort of epiphany: their kinship a thing suddenly understood in the body, and not simply as an idea.

What this experience had led him to confront in the years since, he told me, was a paradox and a frustration about his field of work. None of his colleagues, when questioned, were willing to admit or even to discuss what now seemed to him to be a straightforward and obvious truth: that fundamentally what all of their work was about, was love.