Falling out of the sky.... or the morals of art in a changing climate

Incredibly to me - ever naiive about the baffling passage of time - it's 7 months since I walked between the wind farms of mid-Wales, talking to and recording the people I encountered en route about their perspectives on changing landscape in a changing climate...a film, a book, a dissertation, an MA graduation, two terms of teaching later and last Saturday I returned to Bryn Titli windfarm between Rhayader and Llangurig.

This time I'm in the company of Sara Penrhyn Jones - my friend and film-making collaborator - and journalist Marsha O'Mahony to do a radio interview for BBC Wales about the experience of the walk, the making of the film and what we hope(d) to achieve.

Even through my typically British self-effacing reluctance to acknowledge my own work, I do sense there is something very important in what we've done but I've been woefully poor at disseminating this - life and winter having overtaken me in the meantime - but I am slowly returning to it now with what I hope will become spring-like zeal.

It is weird and wonderful to be back here....especially with Sara who first experienced this landscape through my rough Flip camera footage (though the immediacy of it impressed her enough for us to use a lot of it in the resulting film too) and also to be talking about her experiences in the meantime, filming at Cop 16 in Cancun, hearing (to us baffling, inconceivable) stories from the Maldives and other Pacific countries under immediate threat from climate change, in one case drinking water supplies limited to days few enough that they can be counted on human digits... [20 if this tangled allusion is too cryptic!]

Red kites circle overhead as I watch in bewildered awe as Sara talks with absolute fluid articulacy and vehemence about this and the utter disconnection between this bleak reality and our own awareness and actions - or lack of - to tackle climate change. I'm scared to misquote or weakly paraphrase such impassioned and articulate thought but I want to say she talks about how there is an immorality in an age of climate change to be an artist and yet not to use art as a novel and ultimately more persuasive means to bring these issues to the forefront of a public conciousness saturated by media jargon about climate change with increasingly little awareness of its reality... As always I am inspired and utterly grateful for this collaboration...

Later and with a visceral thrill I stand underneath a wind turbine again and look up at the blades, frightening myself again with the illusion that they are about to slice down on us. Like lying on my back on our vast lawn as a child and feeling like I was falling out of the sky. It's a perspective that, wordlessly, always gave me an immediate sense of the planet, its roundness, its vastness, the infinity of space and minuteness of our lives. Minute as we may be however, I still feel passionate that our contribution to collective consciousness and redressing the balance of lost connection - between our actions and the global environment - can be just as valid, significant and vital.

Tilting at Windmills - film and sound installation

Tilting at Windmills - Film & Sound Installation, Coventry 15-17 Sept

The sound of silent summer

I've been thinking through my legs & ears on this trip...the walking & the sound recording making me as much aware of the contours of the aural landscape as the visual one (which tends to dominate for me). The brush & swish of walking through rushes & grasses, the brush & swish & sometimes beat of turbine blades, my shod feet crunching over stones, streams & rivers, drips, the incessant shove of the wind, but layered onto or behind all this the hum, buzz & grate of insects, the bird song & sharp calls, animal cries.

So there's a paragraph in Mark Lynas's Six Degrees that disturbs me greatly & somehow makes sense of this trip for me... It's in chapter 2 oC (pp 95-96) with 'only' two degrees of warming (a level George Monbiot's Heat suggests we may already be committed to) is a response to Chris Thomas's 2004 Nature paper which revealed that, according to their models, over a third of all species would be committed to extinction by the time global temps reach 2oC including a quarter of European birds (red kite, starling 'near the top of the list'). Lynas writes:

'Consider the thought that living species, which have evolved on this planet over millions of years, could be destroyed for ever in the space of one human generation; that life, in all its fascinating exuberance, can be erased so quickly, and with such leaden finality. As the biologist Edward O. Wilson has suggested, the next century could be an 'Age of Loneliness', when humanity finds itself nearly alone on a devastated planet. In tribute to Rachel Carson, I call this our Silent Summer - a never-ending heatwave, devoid of birdsong, insect hum, and all the weird and wonderful noises that subconsciously keep us company.'

What on earth is that crashing loss set against the relatively insignificant presence of wind turbines in an already changing landscape?

Photos

Last leg to Llangwyryfon

A very short (by my new standards anything less than four miles) walk from Llangwyryfon & I'm up at the wind farm. I can see Mynydd Gorddu & Rheidol from yesterday & Cefn Croes on the far horizon. Beyond that the protective line of Pumlumon peaks obscures the last week's more easterly Powys turbines from view. I can see the adjacent hill where I kept Merlin too.  And the hills around Nantymoch where I've been repeatedly told more turbines are planned with the usual opposition (my Bontgoch interviewee laughed & said emphatically 'people are *driving* up there to see where they're going to be. If they don't *want* them there, why *drive up to see them*?' more laughter at such foolishness).

I'm walking to the village of Llanddeiniol after this to 'finish' the walk, meeting Sara & kids at her friend's house there. I'm greeted with cake & congratulations (I can't quite work out what for initially, I'm still frustrated that my injury-knee nonsense has prevented me walking ALL the way), orange & vanilla tea, tremendous hospitality & best of all ice packs for my knee (which saw me walking the last few miles downhill (much worse than up) like a crab, which would be comic if it wasn't painful). Also then much conversation about the trip, our own attitudes, lifestyles & some contradictions, & the difficulties of committing to the 'frugality' of eco-living which can seem ungenerous & inhospitable (not here though; Sara & I lingered long enough to stay for dinner and Anne our generous host shared a German saying 'three were invited, five came, water down the soup, everyone is welcome') the difficulties that even environmentalists now seem to face in reaching consensus about how we really can avert runaway climate change. We also start planning the logistics of filming on Monday, Anne's daughter will babysit so we can go off on site. I'm still confused about what I want to achieve, so Sara is generous with her filming & editing expertise. I'm bad at communicating my artistic 'vision' which I find hard to articulate until it 'arrives'. I'm also a bit in awe of Sara's expertise & intellect I realise, which makes me a bit reticent to share my unsophisticated ideas. But it's an exciting process & a new exchange.

I just hope that something good will emerge & grow from here. It's not going to change the world but... Jeanette Winterson writes 'the power of art is so immense, even its dilutions are homeopathic'. I truly hope this is so...

'Wind in & out of unwholesome lungs/time before & time after...'

Ah there's a T. S. Eliot line for every occasion (see Bontgoch conversations below for relevance...)

Day 6 & Sara (my collaborator, the film maker) has told me about a family who live right below the Rheidol wind farm & are positive about the turbines. I'm keen to talk to them, because so many people who like them say 'but I don't think I'd want to *live* by them'...

We make hasty arrangements to meet at their house when they get back from town later that morning.

Meanwhile I get the bus to Bwlch Nantyrarian then take a section of the Borth-to-Devil's Bridge route up to the turbines on the common. I photograph massive pylons (oft-cited as the landscape eyesores much less appealing than turbines but to which we've all become accustomed) and an e.on sign which helpfully tells me the make, number and size of the turbines but also says 'no unauthorised access'. This worries me as the map says this is open access land, so when I'm trudging up the hill & hear a car horn behind me, I'm half expecting to be in trouble: i'm not, it's Marie & family, who then walk up the hill to be interviewed right under the turbine.

The Sustainable Development Commission wind power booklet i'd been reading the night before says 'it's possible to have a normal conversation with someone while standing underneath a turbine without either of you having to raise your voice'. This is certainly true - though perhaps not the most normal of conversations - when I ask what they'd paint on a turbine the children all respond 'a rainbow'.

Back down at Nantyrarian visitor centre I interview the Forestry Commission ranger who says on cold, still days the red kites (who are fed at the centre) are canny enough to perch on the unmoving turbine blades, but not fly near them when operational.

Stupidly, too lazy to read the map, I end up following way markers which take me down a tortuous mountain bike track winding up & down the hill. Out of the forest, I pass lakes at Pendam, along Blaenmelindwr & Syfydrin out onto the hill opposite Craig y Pistyll. Now we're in Bontgoch lead mining country, an industry which I realise (belatedly, because it's obvious) had a huge impact on these landscapes & the health of these communities, surely far more destructive than wind energy even in its least positive light.

This is confirmed by an interviewee in the village - a retired lecturer in agriculture who taught in Hampshire & north Wales but was born here in the late 1920s - who talked of the graveyard full of miners who never saw 40, 'their lungs full of dust'. The turbines he sees from his window he uses as a barometer to tell which way the wind is blowing & where the rain will come from. He tells me he'll have to trim his hedge soon so they don't become obscured from view.

It was bumping into this same man on a walk earlier this summer that had given me the inspiration for this project & we talked for a long time about differing agricultural practices, the changes in rural living, transport, school & how much knowledge of self-sufficiency has been lost. He showed me his impressive veg garden, marrows, cabbage, leeks, rhubarb, raspberries (I shared a recipe for the best ever barley & raspberry porridge with rosehip syrup but not sure he was impressed) & carrots grown among the onions for the first time to thwart the carrot fly. We talk about the benefits of companion planting (I can hear my friends laughing at this: all my gardening knowledge is purely theoretical) & he says you have to live a lifetime to find out all these things by trial & error.

A friendly chat with a mountain biker about countryside access as he cycled along at walking pace next to me for a while. Then up onto the hill to look at the turbines: I choose these for the filming site. There are mountains behind & sea in front & a Tir Gofal open access area under two of the turbines.

From here I can see Aber, Clarach where I grew up, the turbines at Rheidol where i've come from that morning & the turbines at Llangwyryfon where I'm going.

It's all starting to make some kind of sense...