What Will Be Left To Carry Forward?

What Will Be Left To Carry Forward?

Editor’s note: DGR believes that it is necessary for organizers to be strategic and efficient in organizing against ecocide. This also includes using technology as a tool for organizing. Therefore, we do not engage in “virtue signalling” and individual lifestyle choices by avoiding the use of technology. However, we are also aware of the harmful effects of these technologies. The following piece is a delving into the impacts of all actions we take and asks “what will be left to carry forward?”

Mankh (Walter E. Harris III) writes, small press publishes, and is the author of 17 books. He travels a holistic mystic Kaballah-rooted pathway staying in touch with Turtle Island and the cycles of the Seasons. His website: www.allbook-books.com


By Mankh

On a day when i am out and about carrying something that has taken a lot of effort to produce, a chunk of notes and written bits for the next book in the works, yet they haven’t been typed into the computer file yet, carrying that little stack of papers, i suddenly become extra cautious, telling myself: Don’t spill coffee, remember where you put it, don’t lose it!… And later on i realize that every day is truly like this, if you think about it and put it into practice, but not ‘practice’ rather deep appreciation and caring for everything and everyone that has brought ‘the item’ to this moment, your own efforts and all those who have helped you along the way, as well as all the experiences and stories of your life thus far written in your heart and feet and hands and organs and mind and soul . . . creating a kind of humanuscript or living story that you are virtually forever editing.

All those who have helped along the way includes, to name a few, the Sun and Earth that have been there and will continue being every day. How much is pre-scripted and how much you write your story is up for discussion . . . i think it’s a bit of both.

Yet the script cuts both ways, literally: “script” from “skrībh-, Proto-Indo-European root meaning “to cut, separate, sift;” an extended form of root sker- (1) “to cut”, also sker- (2) ker-, Proto-Indo-European root meaning “to turn, bend”, Latin scribere “to write” (to carve marks in wood, stone, clay, etc.); Lettish, skripat “scratch, write;” Old Norse, hrifa “scratch.”” (etymonline.net)

On the one hand we can’t help making our marks, leaving footprints, scratching books and such like, yet on the other hand why are we so obsessed with making marks, scratching books, carving into wood and stone, too-often literally defacing the Earth, blowing up mountains, and we’ve all seen the photos of scars due to extractive mining, the faded-brown swaths of deforested Amazon reflecting a scorched Earth policy, not simply a military policy, while the Amazon delivery trucks grow in numbers in the neighborhood.

No matter whether you are carrying your new-born child, a crystal vase, your magnum opus or simply a loaf of bread from the store, every living thing carries within it and emanating from it an immense amount of history and effort and hopefully joy to get it there to you where you are now holding it or perhaps ingesting it. In the long haul, seems to this scratcher that we are here so as to simply carry it forward, whatever “it” is — and that includes water and land.

i have no idea who planted the forsythia and azalea in the backyard of the house before i started living here but i thank them b/c every year like clockwork, just as the forsythia’s bright yellow is mostly turned to green is when the azalea begins opening up its neon red.

Aside from a literary manuscript, etymologically a manuscript is a mark/scratch/cut you make with your hands. Literally it cuts both ways: You could cut up the forest (destroy), or you could carve a piece of art, scratch some letters into a book (create). Then again, even by writing a book, you’re cutting into the forests for more paper. Is there such thing as a win-win situation anymore?

The Kogi (Original People of the Sierra Nevada mountains of Colombia) have no famous authors because they have no books. However, they can ‘read’ water. Think about that! . . . And from what i know, they are in the category of Peoples least likely to cut up the Earth, rather carry Her forward.

To further follow the word-roots, “to turn, bend” suggests another flavor of “script” accentuating the need for adaptability rather than cutting, and, like a Taoist, unassumingly going with the flow . . . “A skillful woodsman leaves neither tracks nor traces.” Now that’s something that would have archaeologists declaring ‘No Taoists lived here’; and they’d be inaccurate.

Everyone experiences cuts in life, some of them heal and some scar. Yet the continued scarring of our consciousnesses and of the Earth reflects the regurgitating of outdated “scripts” and taglines such as “progress” “faster downloading speeds” “you gotta upgrade” “trust the science” “the bottom line” “best seller” “the customer is always right” “education is the key to success” “and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”

If the humanuscript continues to cut up the Earth at the current pace and subdue or lord it over others it considers inferior, what will be left to carry forward?


Truck photo by renaissancegal/Getty Images Signature/Canva

Title photo by eleonimages/Canva

Event Alert: The Struggle for Human and Nonhuman Guardians

Event Alert: The Struggle for Human and Nonhuman Guardians

Editor’s Note: Deep Green Resistance promotes a biocentric worldview. We believe in the dignity of the lives of every creature of the world, and nature herself. Human and nonhuman alike are a part of nature, and should live in harmony with her, not against her.

That’s why we invite you to come to the We Are All In This Together Symposium, a series of live-events where friends of nature can learn more about how to get active in resistance and bring the natural world to the center of their lives in a practical and intertwined way.

This is not an event organized by DGR. Therefore, we may not agree with everything in the event. For example, we believe that climate change is only the symptom of a wider problem, which is the destruction of nature. We do not believe it is possible to tackle climate change without tackling ecocide or biodiversity loss in the first place.

We appreciate the organizers for talking about colonization and commodification of the natural world. Human civilization has de-personified the natural world and nonhumans, stripping them of their inherent dignity and rights. Historically, it have treated indigenous people in the same way. Therefore, we understand the need for decolonization of indigenous people, nonhumans and natural world.

Yet, decolonization is not a simple issue anymore, as is exemplified by an increasing number of indigenous peoples opting to lease their ancestral land for mining companies. This has created a blurring of lines between colonizers and colonized. It is not enough to just return the captured land back to its original custodians. It is also important for the formerly colonized to remove the colonizing mentality of civilization, to return to a lifestyle in harmony with the land, and to restore their status as custodians of the land, rather than to replace the settlers as the “owners” of the land. Only then can we claim to have finally decolonized.


We Are All In This Together Symposium

We Are all in this Together Symposium seeks to reposition environmental stewardship and humanities disciplines within an eco-centric framework. Through a series of three virtual events, we are planning to explore the concepts of land “ownership,” and the importance of honoring nature’s more-than-human guardians. The events will first address the settler colonial history, which has brought us to this point of crisis. Then, we will invite the speakers to explore alternatives that honor the needs and interests of all ecosystems. Together, the speakers will join with audiences to consider how to shift the exploitative paradigm that currently dominates and build a future that protects and respects the life of all ecosystems and communities.

The Symposium is guided under the mission and vision of:

Standing up for the Guardians of the Natural World

 

In a series of three virtual events, we will join to discuss how we can expand the conception of environmental stewardship beyond the human, and unravel the historical roots of the climate crisis. Here you get access to three free live-webinars.

Deconstructing ownership

February 28th @ 6.30 pm EST

This event will grapple with the history of colonization and commodification of the more-than-human world, drawing the connection between settler colonial conception of private property, and the current climate crisis. We will also delve into how we can all shift away from this destructive paradigm and acknowledge the “Rights,” spirit and agency of Land.

The spirits of nature

March 19th @ 6.30 EST


The event will address how communities have, since time immemorial, honored and protected the spirits of the natural world. From communities standing up to defend the guardians of mountains to water guardians that advocate for the spirits of rivers, humans have long acknowledged the existence of the beings who don’t fit into the western empirical conception of nature. These beliefs were and are the foundation of humans’ relationship with the ecosystems they inhabit. In these times of crisis, the event will delve into the historical roots of these relationships, and the importance of celebrating these ancestral worldviews.

Who looks after water

April 9th @ 6.30 EST


This event will focus on how more-than-human beings (such as Trees, Wolves and Eels) are fulfilling their roles and responsibilities towards the ecosystems they call home, while playing their part in maintaining an ecosystem balance that keeps all life flourishing. While the program will delve into the historical nature of these relationships, it will also address how we, humans, can act reciprocally and honor/protect these guardians of water and life.

To participate just click on the links above. For questions contact talkingrivers@riseup.net


Read more about eco-centrism here:

Visual art and storytelling to build resistance

Our roles towards ecosystems of rivers

Photo by kazuend on Unsplash

Steep In the Mystery of Your Deep Imagination

Steep In the Mystery of Your Deep Imagination

Editor’s Note: One of the problems of the civilized world is our obsession with “knowing,” to the point that we cannot stand not knowing. Yet, we know so little about the mysterious ways in which nature works. Ironically, the only way that we can understand the mystery is first by accepting that we do not know. In this post, Rebecca Wildbear invites you to take the step and let nature and your imagination guide you.

“Nature is not more complicated than you think, it is more complicated than you CAN think.” ~Frank Edwin Egler


In the Fertile Darkness:

Steep in the Mystery of Your Deep Imagination

By Rebecca Wildbear/Substack

I follow a river to the sea this morning. Beyond where the waves usually crash on rocky cliffs, I walk into a magic kingdom that emerges in low tide. This rock village, usually hidden underwater, is now glimmering in the sun. The water and windswept shape of the black rocks, warm tide pools, and communities of snails huddled together enchant me—a pod of pelicans floats nearby.

A cave beckons, and I sit down inside and look out at the waves. Most of the time, this cave is under the sea. What would it be like to breathe underwater? To be in this cave and feel the waves approaching, filling, and then receding, waiting for darkness to give way to vision.

Just as changing tides illuminate other worlds, darkness can help us see. The dark is a manifestation of Mystery. Unseen powers live in the dark beyond our understanding. Our willingness to widen our perspective can invite revelation.

Mystery knows better than we do who we are and how we are meant to serve. Our journey is an attempt to listen and understand. The Mystery holds a grander vision and wants to show us. Slow down. Turn your sensory, emotional, and imaginal body inward. Hibernate like a bear in winter. Notice what arises in your heart and mind and what images are at the edge. Be present with whatever comes. Drop the storyline and feel the underlying energy. Be curious. Whatever you notice or experience, consider what guidance it may be delivering.

Tuning In

The dark of the night can be scary. Yet the fertile darkness of stepping into the unknown is terrifying. I still remember my first three-day solo fast in a Utah canyon more than twenty years ago. I could not sleep. Sitting on the rock perch that had invited me high in the canyon, I wondered what I feared. I had been outside at night often, but this time I was fasting alone in a sacred ceremony. I had told the Mystery, the universal consciousness that animates the cosmos and everything in it, that I am willing to let go of my life – my home, my profession, my identity, my relationships – if that is what is asked. But what if I see something I don’t want to see? Something that overwhelms me or instantly alters my life.

As I remember my love of darkness and my longing to listen to what the Mystery unveils, I turn my gaze upward and watch stars flicker in the moonless night. I let go and tune in to my deep imagination.

Our deep imagination comes through our dreams when we sleep. Yet it also exists in the waking world. Eligio Stephen Gallegos calls the deep imagination “a dimension with its own integrity.” The deepest layers of our imagination bubble up and have their own intelligence. We can turn toward these unbidden images at the edge of our consciousness.

We honor our dreams and imagination by being receptive. We do not analyze or interpret what comes. Instead, we seek to live and be guided by these mysteries that come up through the Earth into our psyche. Our deep imagination often surprises us. It comes up with things our minds never could. Do not stress over how deeply you are or are not immersed at first. Swimming in imaginal shallow water is better than having no imagination at all. At least you are in the river, available for deeper currents. To come and carry you away.

The dominant culture trivializes imagination and encourages people to avoid the unknown. Yet darkness is part of the seasons and cycles of life. It helps us grow and strengthens our visionary capacity. What if we dared to step into the dark, ask important questions, and swim in our deep imagination? We could acknowledge what’s deeply not working and seek anew what is meaningful and alive. Perhaps we could find a way to end the life-devouring machine of the dominant culture and create communities that cherish our planet home.

Loving the World

The Earth is creative and life-giving but fragile. As we remember forests that are under assault worldwide and those beings dying in oceans – 90 percent of large fish, 50 percent of coral reefs, and 40 percent of plankton – we can listen for what the Earth needs. We can pray for visions to help us respond to clear-cut forests, plowed prairies, drained wetlands, and the harms of human-only land use.

Our souls are linked to the heart of the world. We can descend into the collective dark night of our planet. And open to the tremendous sorrow of our failure to protect oceans, forests, and rivers. Visions can arise that nourish and cultivate the mythic sinew of humans and the Earth.

Healthy cultures source their actions from the depths. My soul images – the cave pool and underworld river that live under the tree – guide me to invite others into the dark to let go of who they thought they were and deeply listen. To connect with greater forces and unseen worlds, infusing us with fierce creativity that allows the Earth to dream through us.

The dominant culture is unraveling – and needs to. We are already amid the transition. May it alter, dismember, and initiate us. May it help us oppose and let go of the aspects of culture harming life. May the imaginal waters that spring forth from the depths release visionary potential. As we pray and listen, may the seeds of our collective imagining help us reimagine ourselves and our world.

 

Radical Dreaming, invites readers to listen to their bodies, nature, and dreams while unveiling power imbalances and other causes of ecocide. It’s written by Rebecca Wildbear, author of Wild Yoga: A Practice of Initiation, Veneration, & Advocacy for the Earth and Soul guide at Animas Valley Institute.

Photo by Koen meyssen on Unsplash

What Does the Earth Want From Us?

What Does the Earth Want From Us?

Editor’s Note: The Earth wants to live. And she wants us to stop destroying her. It is a simple answer, but one with many complex processes. How do we get there? Shall I leave my attachments with the industrial world and being off-the-grid living, like we were supposed to? Will that help Earth?

Yes, we need to leave this way of life and live more sustainably. But what the Earth needs is more than that. It is not one person who should give up on this industrial way of life, rather it is the entire industrial civilization that should stop existing. This requires a massive cultural shift from this globalized culture to a more localized one. In this article, Katie Singer explores the harms of this globalized system and a need to shift to a more local one. You can find her at katiesinger@substack.com


What Does the Earth Want From Us?

By Katie Singer/Substack

Last Fall, I took an online course with the philosopher Bayo Akomolafe to explore creativity and reverence while we collapse. He called the course We Will Dance with Mountains, and I loved it. I loved the warm welcome and libations given by elders at each meeting’s start. I loved discussing juicy questions with people from different continents in the breakout rooms. I loved the phenomenal music, the celebration of differently-abled thinking, the idea of Blackness as a creative way of being. When people shared tears about the 75+-year-old Palestinian-Israeli conflict, I felt humanly connected.

By engaging about 500 mountain dancers from a half dozen continents, the ten-session course displayed technology’s wonders.

I could not delete my awareness that online conferencing starts with a global super-factory that ravages the Earth. It extracts petroleum coke from places like the Tar Sands to smelt quartz gravel for every computer’s silicon transistors. It uses fossil fuels to power smelters and refineries. It takes water from farmers to make transistors electrically conductive. Its copper and nickel mining generates toxic tailings. Its ships (that transport computers’ raw materials to assembly plants and final products to consumers) guzzle ocean-polluting bunker fuel.

Doing anything online requires access networks that consume energy during manufacturing and operation. Wireless ones transmit electro-magnetic radiation 24/7.

More than a decade before AI put data demands on steroids, Greenpeace calculated that if data storage centers were a country, they’d rank fifth in use of energy.

Then, dumpsites (in Africa, in India) fill with dead-and-hazardous computers and batteries. To buy schooling, children scour them for copper wires.

Bayo says, “in order to find your way, you must lose it.”

Call me lost. I want to reduce my digital footprint.

A local dancer volunteered to organize an in-person meeting for New Mexicans. She invited us to consider the question, “What does the land want from me?”

Such a worthwhile question.

It stymied me.

I’ve lived in New Mexico 33 years. When new technologies like wireless Internet access in schools, 5G cell sites on public rights-of-way, smart meters or an 800-acre solar facility with 39 flammable batteries (each 40 feet long), I’ve advocated for professional engineering due diligence to ensure fire safety, traffic safety and reduced impacts to wildlife and public health. I’ve attended more judicial hearings, city council meetings and state public regulatory cases and written more letters to the editor than I can count.

In nearly every case, my efforts have failed. I’ve seen the National Environmental Protection Act disregarded. I’ve seen Section 704 of the 1996 Telecom Act applied. (It prohibits legislators faced with a permit application for transmitting cellular antennas from considering the antennas’ environmental or public health impacts.) Corporate aims have prevailed. New tech has gone up.

What does this land want from me?

The late ecological economist Herman Daly said, “Don’t take from the Earth faster than it can replenish; don’t waste faster than it can absorb.” Alas, it’s not possible to email, watch a video, drive a car, run a fridge—or attend an online conference—and abide by these principles. While we ravage the Earth for unsustainable technologies, we also lose know-how about growing and preserving food, communicating, educating, providing health care, banking and traveling with limited electricity and web access. (Given what solar PVs, industrial wind, batteries and e-vehicles take from the Earth to manufacture, operate and discard, we cannot rightly call them sustainable.)

What does the land want from me?

If I want accurate answers to this question, I need first to know what I take from the land. Because my tools are made with internationally-mined-and-processed materials, I need to know what they demand not just from New Mexico, but also from the Democratic Republic of Congo, from Chile, China, the Tar Sands, the deep sea and the sky.

Once soil or water or living creatures have PFAS in them, for example, the chemicals will stay there forever. Once a child has been buried alive while mining for cobalt, they’re dead. Once corporations mine lithium in an ecosystem that took thousands of years to form, on land with sacred burial grounds, it cannot be restored.

One hundred years ago, Rudolf Steiner observed that because flicking a switch can light a room (and the wiring remains invisible), people would eventually lose the need to think.

Indeed, technologies have outpaced our awareness of how they’re made and how they work. Technologies have outpaced our regulations for safety, environmental health and public health.

Calling for awareness of tech’s consequences—and calling for limits—have become unwelcome.

In the last session of We Will Dance with Mountains, a host invited us to share what we’d not had a chance to discuss. AI put me in a breakout room with another New Mexican. I said that we’ve not discussed how our online conferences ravage the Earth. I said that I don’t know how to share this info creatively or playfully. I want to transition—not toward online living and “renewables” (a marketing term for goods that use fossil fuels, water and plenty of mining for their manufacture and operation and discard)—but toward local food, local health care, local school curricula, local banking, local manufacturing, local community.

I also don’t want to lose my international connections.

Bayo Akomolafe says he’s learning to live “with confusion and make do with partial answers.”

My New Mexican friend aptly called what I know a burden. When he encouraged me to say more, I wrote this piece.

What does the land want from us? Does the Earth want federal agencies to create and monitor regulations that decrease our digital footprint? Does the Earth want users aware of the petroleum coke, wood, nickel, tin, gold, copper and water that every computer requires—or does it want these things invisible?

Does the Earth want us to decrease mining, manufacturing, consumption—and dependence on international corporations? Does it want children to dream that we live in a world with no limits—or to learn how to limit web access?

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Call Me a Nimby” (a response to Bill McKibben’s Santa Fe talk)

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Transportation within our means: initiating the conversation overdue

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Photo by Noah Buscher on Unsplash

Nuyts Wilderness Walk to Thompson Cove

Nuyts Wilderness Walk to Thompson Cove

Editor’s Note: In our fight for the defense of the natural world, it is important that we feel connected to nature. Given that there is so little left in the world that could be called “natural,” it may be hard to do for many of us. It is in this spirit that we bring to you a story of a walk into the wilderness of Nuyts in the south west of Western Australia. At the beginning of the year, we hope you feel closer to your roots: the mother Earth.


Thompson Cove through Nuyts

By Susanne Coulstock

Finally, exactly two months after my birthday, we had the time, headspace and energy to go do the Nuyts Wilderness Walk that was my birthday hike choice for this year. We had done a gorgeous reconnaissance hike in preparation for it a couple of months back, and it was good to at last have a day set aside in good weather for this long and special wilderness trail.

Track Map - Nuyts Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia

We began near the Deep River bridge and set out for Thompson Cove.

Did I mention the old-growth Karri/Tingle forest is awe-inspiring? There is so little of it left – I wish I could travel back in time 250 years to see this place before it was colonised by a destructive industrial culture which has chewed its way through most of the coastal ecosystems since arriving – and to put an invisible shield around Australia to stop Europeans from ever finding this continent. Imagine Australia if it had remained in the hands of its Indigenous people, who lived here for 60,000 years without utterly destroying the place.

Nuyts Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia

Track maps and information on local hikes were posted near the bridge.

Nuyts Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia
Nuyts Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia

Today we were heading for Thompson Cove, but we are keen to do this gorgeous walk all over again to check out alternative destination Aldridge Cove.

Nuyts Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia

On our reconnaissance walk into the Nuyts we had gone from John Rate Lookout via Mt Clare to this bridge – which is so wobbly we crossed it one at a time so we’d not fall over!

Nice views of the Deep River in either direction – this is one of the few rivers in South-Western Australia which still has intact riparian vegetation and relatively clean water. Most of the others, including the Swan and Canning Rivers in the state capital, are polluted sewers with denuded and eroded banks. When we walk in conservation areas like this, we get a glimpse of the world as it was before Homo colossus began to systematically destroy it.

Nuyts Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia
Nuyts Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia

You may notice the water is brownish. This is caused by natural tannins in the riparian vegetation. Imagine it as a kind of cold-brewed tea. There are many rivers and inlets on the South Coast which naturally contain tannins from the surrounding native vegetation. In Scotland this happens in peat bogs; people traditionally tanned leather there. Here’s Tom Langhorne explaining how that is done, without causing the kind of environmental damage and waste associated with industrial tanning. By the way, many hides these days are going into landfill because of vegan objections to leather, and the low cost of synthetic and non-biodegradable substitutes – which is so utterly wasteful, earth-polluting and nonsensical.

One of Tom Langhorne’s many wonderful videos on traditional survival skills in his native Scotland

The first walk section immediately after the bridge took us through Karri forest. Here’s some of the beauty all around in that place. This vibrant banksia flower below was one of a cluster on the ground. Local cockatoos often nip off flowers and fruits this way – but only some of them.

Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia

Walking, you will often go through stands of Casuarinas in the forest, which create a little world of their own. The path we were on was wonderfully soft and springy; the sort that you would walk on for hours just for the joy of it. The aromas in the air were a lovely mix of freshness, recent rain, earth, aromatic oils from the various myrtaceous species, fungi, and the decomposition of plant materials in the humus layer. Get down on the ground sometime after rain in a natural forest, lift some of the leaves off the ground until you get to where the fungal mycelia are, and take some deep breaths. One of the best smells on the planet.♥

And this is not the same in a tree plantation – yet many modern people would not be able to distinguish between a natural forest, a logged forest and a plantation. Of course, there are few remnant forest ecosystems left, so most contemporary Westerners have never walked in one; we’re lucky on the South Coast of Western Australia that there are still patches of it around. Those places are incomparable and took many thousands of years to become what they are. One of the reasons I write these hiking photoessays is to show people who haven’t had the opportunity to experience for themselves what Australian remnant ecosystems look like up close.

Nuyts Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia
Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia
Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia

And here’s one of Jess and me.

Nuyts Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia

I always find it astonishing to look at the impoverished parklands people create around cities that they apparently find aesthetically appealing. I hike in what nature has made; it’s absolutely no comparison. This forest is a wonderland filled with life and its life-sustaining processes. It is species-rich, complex and interconnected to such an astounding degree. If anyone hasn’t read Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life yet, let me highly recommend it.

Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia

We took lots of photos of mosses, lichens, fungi. This is nature recycling, and making a great deal of beauty and life doing so. Our culture talks about recycling and it’s mostly a myth – in nature it’s a law.

Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia
Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia
Nuyts Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia
Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia

Below you can see the construction of an ant-lion, who creates a funnel to trap prey insects to feed on. In nature, the population excesses of each species become food for another species so that no species assumes plague proportions, and diversity can flourish. It is important for Westerners to have a good look at their attitudes to mortality, which is not the tragedy it is made out to be by people who are more invested in fear and ego survival than they are awed by the circle of birth-life-death-life in nature, going around like a gift and creating the most astonishing and beautiful world in which we get a brief turn on the stage which we should honour, and learn our kinship in.

Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia

Most people who haven’t grown up near places like this see predator-prey as “nature red in tooth and claw” – well, who’s projecting but Homo colossus, the most destructive species of them all, harbouring many pathological individuals who kill for kicks or greed, not for basic sustenance – a culture that has destroyed much of the biosphere itself, instead of taking basic sustenance from other species’ reproductive excess and yielding themselves in turn at the end.

Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia

Woodland and heathland alternated with patches of forest as we progressed towards the coast.

Nuyts Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia

It’s fungal fruiting season since the autumn rains finally saturated the earth, and it’s spectacular. We took lots of photos and we know Sara will enjoy those.♥ Fungi are amazing creatures. I would really like people to understand that all life forms are alive and precious – not just humans and the animals we find cute. Also, that all life is sentient, not just things with a nervous system like our own.

Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia
Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia
Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia
Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia
Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia

Also that the species is more important than the individual. In nature, individuals feed on other individuals in the food web, but they do not exterminate entire species – something our completely insane ecocidal culture does routinely, and currently at the rate of ~200 species every day. I can’t tell you how obscene that is; and the utter irony that so much destruction is being carried out as we speak by making so-called “green” technologies.

Also news flash: “Green” vegan soy (which is grown in destructive monocultures and shipped from far away) isn’t a lesser environmental problem than people eating the grass-fed herbivores on their own locality’s existing pastures. People should eat as locally as possible and avoid as much as possible all forms of intensive animal or plant production. I’m having a relatively easy time avoiding feedlotted animal products as a smallholder, eating the beef off our own grass, pastured eggs and dairy grown by other local smallholders, and accessing organically grown F&V from my own garden. I am having a very hard time coming off the intensively farmed plant products that form the backbone of calorie intake for most of us: The cereals, the legumes, mostly grown as monocrops with high fertiliser, herbicide, pesticide and fossil fuel inputs in devastated countryside far from where I live. The flour for my bread, the lentils for my soup. No wonder Irish peasants ate a lot of potatoes, and that I am always trying to grow more of them. It’s the most calorie-dense plant food I can grow, but it’s not an easy crop. I need to collect a lot of animal manure to grow it.

The central problem is how far we have drifted from being a part of the food web. Ideally you’d be hunter-gathering, but most of the world’s natural ecosystems have been devastated by our industrial culture, and most of us have neither the constitution nor the skills required for that kind of life. We are moored in our own modernity, with the wreckage all around us. The best I can do is to try to grow my own food and eat as locally as possible. My husband and I consider native ecosystems sacrosanct and live where we do to steward for conservation 50 hectares of native sclerophyll woodlands and heathlands that came with 10 hectares of pasture on which we run a smallholding according to organic and permaculture principles. We’re planting shelter belts and wildlife habitat into the pasture, battling invasive species (like local pasture mainstay kikuyu, an African runner grass) with glyphosate to be able to do this (the lowest-impact herbicide for conservation work – please read the downloadable pdf in this link if you want to understand the context), don’t have tractors or any other fossil fuel driven farm machinery and are feeding ourselves and others while fine-tuning our practices.

In an ideal world we’d all be working on getting back to entirely local low-external-input food-growing systems that allow wildlife back into devastated areas, while drastically reducing our family sizes to counteract the at least tenfold overshoot of our species – but that’s another topic. When we are hiking in natural ecosystems like this, I can’t help but be aware that human beings lived in and off these original Australian ecosystems for 60,000 years without bulldozing or ploughing or polluting or concreting over anything, and without taking more than they needed. They also took active steps to limit the offspring they produced and lived in a harmony with their environment that our own massively destructive and ever-expanding coloniser culture can only dream about.

Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia

Do you notice how the leaf margins of the tree seedling above have been gnawed? This is normal life in a food web. Were this an ornamental in a park or garden, many Homo colossus would reach for a bottle of pesticide and exterminate insects, who are “bad” for causing such “damage” (we’ll skip the massive irony over who is saying that). But in a natural system, a degree of herbivory on the leaves of plants is as normal and necessary as a degree of predation on animals, for reasons discussed earlier. There is inbuilt resilience to such losses, and if you plant some eucalypts away from their natural ranges, they may break entire branches from excess weight because their foliage isn’t being appropriately pruned by the herbivores that feed on them.

Below we have a photo of a Macrozamia palm. Local Noongar people collected their large seeds to eat. Like many of their traditional plant foods, these seeds required soaking to leach out toxic chemicals. The local Indigenous diet was quite high in animal foods and comparatively low in plant foods. Australia is one of the most difficult places to survive hunter-gathering. Local marsupial mammals have an about two degree Celsius lower body temperature than the average placental mammal, to conserve energy on the available resources. The kangaroo has one of the most energy-efficient locomotion methods on the planet. Koalas, surviving off difficult to digest eucalyptus leaves, are super-slow, like sloths.

Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia

To survive in the Australian bush, humans have to be prepared to eat whatever is available: The plant seeds, tubers and greens they can find and detoxify if necessary, larger animal species like kangaroo and emu, the small mammals like bettongs and possums which have gone into rapid decline since the arrival of the Europeans, birds, eggs, fish, shellfish, lizards, turtles, frogs, and insects like the Witchetty grub, which an elder from a different Australian region to ours shows us the ins and outs of in the clip below.

I love the attitude of the Indigenous people in this clip to eating the grub. It’s just food. If you see a white Australian demonstrate how to eat a Witchetty grub, there is usually a lot of chest-beating and machismo to go with the meal. The kids I taught in high school often wrinkled their noses at the idea of eating a grub, but as I pointed out to them, most of us love and regularly eat evaporated condensed bee vomit (honey). It’s just that we don’t call it that.

We also eat matured plant ovaries (fruit), ground-up plant embryos and their endosperm (flour), whole plant embryos (in almonds, peanuts etc), and mussels which are during the breeding season largely ovary and/or testicle, and all their other innards. Then there’s eggs; I’m sure I don’t have to explain where those come from. And cheese, well, that is a product made from the secretions of a modified sebaceous gland, fermented by microbes and containing their excrements. And it’s delicious.

To which the middle school age range often said, “OK, Miss, I’m never going to eat anything else again!” But of course they did; the point is, it’s just that much of what we do is not considered, it’s unthinking autopilot. Especially if you’re buying processed food or even packaged meat, you can be totally divorced from the consciousness that living beings are the sustenance of other living beings (unless you can photosynthesise, and even then, plants need the minerals from the dead bodies of other living things and help recycle those). You don’t see where your food came from and you should see where it came from. If you grow your own, or even buy from local growers, you can be much more aware of what is sustaining you, where it came from and whether you are OK with that.

And you can at leisure consider whether it is fair on other life forms to have more than one child in our current human overshoot situation, where we have already converted much of the planetary biomass into humans and their agricultural plants and animals and driven countless species into extinction with our anthropocentrism and narcissistic focus on individual rights to do as we damn well please.

Nuyts Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia

People lived here once, and ate what the forest provided, and did not take more than they needed, or sell any of it to anyone, for a profit or at all. And before our ecocidal culture, so did our ancestors; don’t forget this. We are all descended from people who once were hunter-gatherers, and were conquered by the sociopaths who were advantaged by the toxic culture of conquest, and their enablers. Remember this when you notice sociopaths and their enablers in our own day and age.

Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia

These pretty shelf fungi are rumoured to be edible. Of course, as was explained to me when I was little: All mushrooms are edible; some only once. I love mushrooms, to look at and to eat – but as I am living outside of these remnant ecosystems, and my later ancestors were agricultural people, I feel duty bound to try to scrape my food from what I can grow in an ecocide zone that I am simultaneously trying to help the wild things back into.

Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia
Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia

Xanthorrhoea preissii, the grass-tree pictured below, was dubbed a Blackboy by Europeans for its resemblance (when it carries a flower stalk) to an Indigenous hunter standing on one leg holding a spear. It’s an image that makes the child in me smile and the adult in me long for the time when that would have been a common sight in this part of the world. Those were far better days, ecologically and in terms of social justice. The ecological part of my statement is self-evident. The social part: Indigenous societies, while not perfect either, did not routinely dispossess a large part of their tribe in order to provide a small part with unjustified riches and a pedestal from which to spit on and oppress others. Unemployment and homelessness were not things that plagued their worlds. Yet our Western culture has made many people homeless, and so many billions and billions of wild creatures that it crushed and drove out.

Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia

The tree below lost its top some time ago, maybe to lightning or a storm – but look how it grows regardless, and is beautiful in how it is shaped by its responses to challenges. You don’t see trees like this in city parks – they would be considered objectionable, like a supermarket apple that doesn’t look like a plastic model of an apple and exactly the same as all the others. Anything like that, our ignorant and soulless culture wants to throw out, cut down, dismiss, destroy, replace with something “better”.

Nuyts Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia

I love wild places like this, and feel deeply at home in them. I remember I am an animal and the earth is my mother. And though the people of my own culture have ransacked this planet and its wildlands, and driven many of my brothers and sisters to extinction, and brought genocide and awful ongoing suffering to cultures more benign and wiser than our own, my heart recognises my home and who I was supposed to be; and this I will try to be, for as long as I have breath.

Nuyts Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia
Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia

Credit for my hiking staff goes to my husband, who began making them a few years ago from selected branches of different origin. Mine is made from a pine sapling that is an invasive species here and grew in a grove across the road from us, where each year dozens more pines pop up, potentially displacing trees more useful to wildlife. At least the cockatoos eat their seeds, but this also spreads them.

Nuyts Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia

Next we crossed another footbridge over a nice clear stream. This is like something out of Lord Of The Rings, like Rivendell. I think one deep reason many of us are drawn to imaginary places like that is because so much of that was once real – the natural world before civilisation, industry, pollution, power lines, roads, cars – and are an alternative route we could have taken, had sociopathy and soullessness not created Homo colossus. Our culture is the Orcs, is Sauron, slicing up the Ents and anything else it can get its hands on as fodder for its greed and its never-ending wars.

Nuyts Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia
Nuyts Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia
Nuyts Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia
Nuyts Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia
Nuyts Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia
Nuyts Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia
Nuyts Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia
Nuyts Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia

Here is the base of a Karri tree so you can see it bark. Karri is called Eucalyptus diversicolor because of the colour of its bark.

Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia

In the next photo, we are looking up at this massive tree, and it is impossible for me to fit all its branches into the frame.

Remember, all these things make themselves and each other. It took millions of years to get here, and our mainstream culture has no qualms about getting its chainsaws out in a place like this, or bulldozing it to the ground to make way for its suburbs, freeways and industrial estates. Homo colossus takes living ecosystems, degrades or outright kills them, and turns them into dead commodities and built environments. The word some American Indigenous tribes have for that kind of insanity is wetiko – literally a virus of selfishness, an evil spirit that invades the human mind and makes a person insatiable.

Nuyts Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia
Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia

These are blackboy stems, in various stages of being recycled.

Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia
Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia

I just love the way some trees grow all gnarly in a natural ecosystem.

Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia

Increasingly, the coastward path took us through heathlands with very sandy, acid soils.

Nuyts Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia

This is where you can find a lot of carnivorous plants. Western Australia is estimated to have over a third of the world’s carnivorous plant species. The soils here are ancient and have been leached over millennia of the fertility of geologically young soils. The sand in valley floors like this is referred to by farmers as “gutless” but hosts many of our biodiversity hotspots. It turns out that challenging conditions combined with geological stability and a long continental isolation result in a plethora of evolutionary solutions, including many unusual cooperative relationships. The carnivorous plants are straightforward – it’s an advantage to be able to catch your own organic fertiliser. A number of lineages did that, and evolved into different directions which differentiated into new species over time.

Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia

These lovely rosettes are sundews (Drosera spp), of which there are many different species. Some are rosettes, other filigreed climbers. The rosette varieties tend to throw up one central flower sometime in spring, usually white. If you look closely, you will see “dewdrops” at the ends of fine hairs. These are sticky secretions with digestive enzymes. Midges and other small insects are caught like on flypaper and digested in situ. The minerals are absorbed through the leaves.

Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia

We were now mostly in coastal heathlands with clumps of stunted eucalypts, and could see the edges of the coast.

Nuyts Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia

At this point we reached a track turning that made a good lunch stop.

Nuyts Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia

Behind Brett is an access track that looks like it might be worth exploring in future years, as this is such a lovely area.

Nuyts Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia

Both the Bibbulmun and the Nuyts tracks turned left at this point. This was the view ahead.

Nuyts Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia

We sat under a tree at the track intersection and had slices of “dog food” – nicknamed thusly because it has rice and animal protein like a dog kibble and is a fairly complete food. It’s actually a baked rice slice with tuna, cheese, egg, yoghurt, spring onion and cracked pepper. Even the dog likes it, of course.

Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia
Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia

And then we were off again for the second half of the trip to Thompson Cove.

Nuyts Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia
Nuyts Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia

We found an ants’ nest with a quite spectacular ground cover next to it.

Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia
Nuyts Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia
Nuyts Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia

There was a strange denuded area that ran right and left of the track at one point. It is really tempting to blame humans for that; must’ve done something…

Nuyts Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia

In the distance in the picture below is one of those famous blackboy flower spikes that looks like a long spear held aloft.

Nuyts Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia

If you get photographed in front of one, it gives the impression of having an exotic over-the-top hairstyle.

Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia

We were heading for that coastal headland in the distance that is just creeping over the horizon.

Nuyts Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia
Nuyts Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia
Nuyts Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia

We got to a lovely large stand of banksias. These are highly susceptible to the imported pathogen Phytophthora cinnamomi; this was still a dieback-free area. Many banksias have been killed in Australian conservation areas by the spread of this disease.

Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia

And then we could smell the ocean we were rapidly approaching.

Nuyts Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia
Nuyts Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia
Nuyts Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia
Nuyts Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia

At the Thompson cove turn-off, we saw that the track would take us down a steep V-shaped valley with a stream running through its centre. This was fun to walk, sort of like a place in a child’s adventure story from the time of Enid Blyton or before, when many Western children still routinely went to interesting natural places on foot or by bicycle. It is extraordinary how this has changed in a very few generations; now most Western children grow up like battery chickens in suburbia, usually cooped up indoors, and in severe nature deficit. The world population has more than tripled since Enid Blyton wrote her stories, and much of that extra population has been crammed into cities. This isn’t fair on children, or on the wild places that have been exterminated in order to grow the human population further into overshoot – or for that matter on the wild places that remain and don’t have the love and respect of those children.

Nuyts Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia
Nuyts Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia
Nuyts Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia
Nuyts Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia
Nuyts Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia
Nuyts Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia
Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia
Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia
Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia

And there was Thompson’s Cove (which should of course have a Noongar name, since Thompson was not the first person to encounter it).

Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia

Little teensy coves like this are scattered along the South Coast in-between the bigger coves and bays. It is always a pleasure to discover them in your own life during a long walk. I am one of those people who believes coves like this should only be reachable on foot, though of course, the mainstream is trying to “improve accessibility” for the disabled (which I can understand) but mostly for the lazy who think it’s too much effort to get fit and walk on your own two feet. This is why more and more habitat is being bulldozed for 4WD access, and more and more remote beaches are churned up as members of Homo colossus treat them like their private demolition derby tracks, scare the wildlife off them and leave their rubbish and excrement behind everywhere.

Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia

Places that are only accessible on foot on long walks tend along our South Coast to still be free from the tide of plastic rubbish that is choking the natural world. It’s funny how the hikers tend to be a different type of person to the 4WD-ing general public – and in Australia, the majority of people who can afford the loans now drive 4WD and SUV. These monstrosities now outnumber erstwhile “normal” cars on our roads. This is one reason the fuel efficiency of the average car on the road hasn’t improved in Australia since the 1970s. Meanwhile, the population of the country more than doubled, and an even bigger percentage of that bigger population now drive cars, neatly demonstrating that both skyrocketing population and increasing consumption per capita are killing our planet.

We found no rubbish in Thompson Cove and I do not need to tell you how rare an experience that is becoming. It’s also likely that the kind of hikers who visit here would pick up any rubbish they see in a place like this and carry it out. And this is a good time to mention Melissa from our online group, who does exactly this at Lake Tahoe in America.♥

Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia
Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia

We sat down to have afternoon tea on the side of this cove: Slices of home-made pecan pie and slugs of hot tea from thermoses.

Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia
Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia
Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia

Southern Ocean seas are massive this time of year; the waves crashed spectacularly over the rocky points. Across the water, far away, only Antarctica. So, there is a wide fetch that the Roaring Forties can work into a frenzy.

Nuyts Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia
Nuyts Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia
Nuyts Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia

In a cove like this, you have to take off your boots to feel the sand beneath your feet.

And you have to bestow affection on the aging dog, who has been just the best dog ever the whole 10 years since we adopted her from a farm dog breed rescue when she was 9 months old and had been discarded by a Homo colossus into bushland far from any town to fend for herself (and I would like to do the same with her erstwhile owner). The ranger thankfully came across her, but she was still very skinny after being fed for a few weeks at the rescue.

Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia
Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia

There was a fair bit of upside-down wiggling and doggie laughing. We once caught that rigmarole on film at a hiking hut on the Nullaki Peninsula:

Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia
Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia
Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia
Nuyts Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia
Nuyts Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia

Occasionally you visit a place where you don’t just take off your boots in response, but your whole kit. It’s a bit like taking off your shoes when you visit a temple. It’s just that nature is the actual temple, and when you get to an unspoilt place like this where the temple has not been sullied, it’s an instinctive response to strip yourself down to your essence and to shed all the layers that civilisation has put on you – both clothing and metaphor.

We thought about including some spontaneous black-and-white photographs of bare backsides and the sea in this actual report – just like in National Geographic articles on members of other cultures than Homo colossus which still survive in small pockets around the world and practice their traditions. However, those didn’t turn out, and those that did – well, we weren’t going to inflict anything full frontal on our audience, for various reasons, although it would have led to an extended rant on the current fashion for infantilising adult females by getting them to remove their pubic hair, something that has astonished me for a long time. I don’t partake in that, thank you very much – I like having a bush, and pubic hair has several useful functions, one of which – friction reduction on delicate bits of undercarriage – should be fairly obvious to anyone who spends a lot of time hiking; but it seems some people prefer to take off what nature has kindly provided, and then use products with names like Anti Monkey Butt, which will help keep our economy rolling etc.

Nuyts Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia

Then yours truly and lovely husband retraced our steps up the steep valley around the little stream that pours into the sea at this location.

Nuyts Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia
Nuyts Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia
Nuyts Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia

Halfway up there was a flat area where other visitors had put on a camp fire recently.

Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia
Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia

This was the view back to the cove. This really is an incredible place.

Nuyts Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia
Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia

We have a few more photos from the return trip; here’s a group of vistas taken from near the banksia grove in the vicinity of the track turning where we had had our lunch earlier.

Nuyts Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia
Nuyts Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia
Nuyts Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia
Nuyts Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia
Nuyts Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia

Back at the track turning, we had a rehydration stop. The dog has her own bottle when we go to places there isn’t plentiful fresh water.

Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia

Beautiful large Karri tree that has been there since before I was born; and these days, that’s saying something. I now keep age-related matters simple by rounding myself up to the nearest 100.

Nuyts Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia
Nuyts Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia

Even a tree hollow is its own universe. Everything in nature is like one of those Matryoshka dolls – layers and layers and layers, except each layer is unlike the one before. You could find more layers going up closer, over and over until you end up with subatomic particles and energy and space, and the further mysteries of that. Or you could zoom out, to the tree, to its immediate neighbourhood, to the forest, to the regional biosphere, to the continent, and go up and up until you were in amongst the stars looking down at the beautiful, fragile, once blue-green planet floating like a marble in space. And you could go further out until you are in the Horsehead Nebula, and then some.

Meanwhile Homo colossus is focusing on its toys, status, drama and political cycles, busy obliterating the biosphere of that fragile marble so that its investment portfolios can grow, ho hum, pass the butter.

Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia
Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia
Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia

I really hope this eucalyptus seedling grows into a hundred-year-old tree…

Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia

More beautiful little universes. How anyone could on reflection think them worth trading for the universal dross of Homo colossus is beyond me.

Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia
Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia
Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia

And this concluded our Nuyts Wilderness hike, for this day. The old dog had enjoyed herself and was looking forward to a decent meal, followed by curling up on her sofa at home.

Nuyts Wilderness Walk / Thompson Cove - Walpole, South Coast, Western Australia

Thank you for joining us on our hike and our reflections. We hope you have enjoyed the photographs of this beautiful wilderness area that we wanted to bring back for those of you who are in different parts of the world, and that you can feel that a part of you has now been there too.♥

Jess Snuggled Up - Red Moon Sanctuary, Redmond, Western Australia

All the pictures in the post are taken by Brett and Susanne Coulstock


A Note of Gratitude

At the end of the year 2023, we would like to thank all of our supporters. Your constant support, by any means that you can, has helped us to do our part in defense of the natural world. Thank you!

Also, at this moment, we would like to inform you that there had been some technical glitch in our normal donation server. We would like to humbly thank our donors for bringing that to our notice. For those of you it has inconvenienced, we would like to sincerely apologize and inform you that we have set up a temporary donation site for that purpose: https://givebutter.com/SA0iCU

Thank you!

 

November Falling

November Falling

Editor’s Note: This piece was offered by Austin Persons. He wrote this in the last fall, with a sense of grief over what has been lost in the natural world.


November Falling

By Austin Persons

In this time of transitions deciduous forests glow, rustling softly on the breeze. Leaves, having fed their trees since spring, drift poetically to Earth. They wish to protect the ground which sustains their community, to merge with the infinite in the second half of their lives as leaves.

In the way of November forests, I release ideas that sustain me. They long to be shared, to keep growing, to return to all that made them possible, to take deep purpose in becoming—new forms of action and matter—in the second half of their lives as ideas. From my swaying limbs I shed gratitude and love. Like sunlight and water united, they enlarged my outwardly reaching heart with a new ring of growth. Landing thick now like a blanket over the Earth, love and gratitude embrace the rich humus from which they were born; to protect, to become, and to sustain future generations. And I glow – brilliant red and gold, brown and green against the blue sky. Lines of distinction blur. I am a colorblind rainbow rustling in the soft afternoon breeze, contemplating the coming seasons, imagining new ways of being and becoming.

In the way of November leaves, my thoughts dance through the sky and flutter across the ground searching for purpose, that place where they alone can fit; in the embrace of kin on the slow journey back to the Source. Leaves and thoughts, one and the same, scrape over the homogenous landscape of progress. They mourn. They want nothing more than to cover these forsaken places thickly under a blanket of love, but it is hard to settle on concrete and asphalt. They shudder at the thought of being swept up, bagged and buried in a landfill; discarded, rendered purposeless among countless precious gifts from our Mother. So they keep moving, grieving the loss of timeless living legends, irreplaceable works of art – sacrificed without cause for someone’s short-sighted delusions of wealth.

I wonder what messages these leaves carry, where they will settle, and how they will council once all have arrived. Could the wild leaves understand what they had never seen, could the civilized leaves see beyond what they had always known? My wild and civilized thoughts wrestle when they meet, they hardly speak the same language. Their greatest desire, however, is to find common ground; a place worth settling, a reason to decay into something greater than one among kin of every shape and color. I wonder if it is not so among the falling leaves.

I find myself grieving, searching along with the leaves, wondering whether I will be able to fulfill my duties or be rendered purposeless; buried in a heap of waste that once was wealth.

Like time, leaves and thoughts circle; narrowly, broadly, remembering, forgetting, creating, destroying, uniting darkness and light. White expands across the spectrum of possibility through the prism of thought, I search for answers on the margins of perception.

I ask the wind to carry my love and gratitude to Life, to the Ancestors, along with a plea for help. I tell them of the crusades against their legacy, of violence against present and future generations perpetrated by those who claim to be our leaders. I beg the Ancestors on behalf of Life to intervene. Whisper in our ears, show us visions when we close our eyes, guide us down the faintest of paths in the dimmest of light. Help us remember our place, and to know the way there. For I want to honestly embrace Life—long and warm—look deeply into her eyes and say without speaking: I promise to love you forever.

As a swift gust of wind paints the evening sky, the forest erupts with song and dance.

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