Council Coffee
I’m out with the dog, observing the patches of grass the council has left to grow wild in the parks around my house. Slightly bigger than last year, but not enough. Not given the biodiversity crisis we’re facing.
If your gut instinct is one of apathy, check that. It’s easy to hear these words so much that we switch off, but our generation is charged with the reparation of nature. Not because we have any kind of dominion over it, but because our abhorrent ignorance of the system we belong to – and I’m not talking about capitalism or neo-liberalism – has royally shafted it and now we are just as endangered as the rest of it. Now is not the time to bow to how troubling that fact is, but to spring to action, however small it might be.
On that basis, I email the local council to first congratulate their efforts here, but in the next sentence, suggest there are many areas that still get mown, that could be left to wild.
A few days later I’m sat in front of the head of environmental services. This is to be applauded. They could have ignored, or pacified me with some copy and paste FAQ, but they asked me in for a natter. An natter we do, about the way it all works, about how the council must always try to listen to everyone, and find compromise.
Sadly, this averaging restricts the serious, significant action required as we try to make up for lost time.
It’s not as if I don’t already have my hands full. Hectic career, two kids, dog, social life – even if it is brittle at best – but we all live and die by the ailing ecosystem that needs our efforts to fix.
What I do leave with is an open invitation – there’s no budget for any kind of art, but they will do their best to support the efforts of their constituents in other ways. And so my unconscious gets to work on ways I can channel my negative emotions about people overlooking the vital importance of their garden spaces. Why they shouldn’t be felling trees, or shaving that lawn to death just to ‘keep it tidy’ as if this is a post-war flex from the late 1940s. What I learned from the council invite is that if you don’t just criticise and attack people, they might be more open than you think to welcoming you into a bigger conversation. One that can facilitate an action that supports our mental health, our environment, and creativity.
We live in an unbelievably interesting time, and I think we have a bigger part to play in it than we allow ourselves to believe, and the role of creativity in it is monumental.