Minefield Control Tower, Holiwell Point

New Geographies Instagram post

Last year I nominated the Minefield Control Tower at Holiwell Point as a site for an artistic intervention as part of

Bioregioning: Ed Tyler

Ed Tyler’s Bioregional Food Mapping Session at the National Permaculture Diploma Gathering November 2011

Permaculturalist Ed Tyler has been exploring bioregional action and thought up on his own peninsula in Kintyre. With the name of his blog he has coined a new word for the re-inhabitation lexicon: bioregioning.

He goes on to define the word on the blog About page.

Bioregioning: from verb “to bioregion”; act of bringing your bioregion into existence through:-

 grounding, connecting, celebrating, belonging

This usefully re-positions what can easily become a philosophic exercise in just thinking about bioregions into an action focussed process in manifesting bioregions.

He continues by inviting us to engage with some activities he associated with bioregioning, which I clumsily summarise as:

• Wander
• Garden
• Make connections with nature
• Make connections with neighbours
• Celebrate

But it’s really worth reading Tyler’s longer form descriptions. Similarly he lists what Bioregioning involves:

• slowing down, looking and feeling inward and outward to the land, water, creatures and people around you
• making music, clothes, buildings, sculptures, relationships, furniture, poems, paintings and other necessities from locally available materials
• cycling and sharing resources, money and energy within your region
• growing and eating locally sourced, seasonally abundant, food
• networking and collaborating with each other to build diverse communities and ecologies

I think that his simple rendering of bioregioning provides a good pointer towards ‘next steps’ after I complete the Bioregional Quiz questions (that’s right, I’ve not forgotten about these!)

Some of Ed Tyler’s bioregional mapping

 

Make Doggerland Great Again

Two things first drew my eyes to the work of Maxim Peter Griffin when I first encountered him on Twitter: the bold quality of his artwork, and his references to

The Wild East

‘The landward farms produced not only corn, cattle and sheep but great herds of half-wild horses and ponies with a sprinkling of donkeys. They roamed free as the wind over the wide rough grass marshes bordering the sea-wall. When the day came for them to be rounded up and sent to market at Wickford and elsewhere, the scene was like something out of the Wild West. Rough riders on horseback, with cracking whips and yelling in broad Essex, hustled the horses, with flying manes, flourishing their tails like banners, into wooden corrals where they could be sorted out, branded and taken quietly up the lane to the farm on the way to market.’

– James Wentworth Day, A Garland of Hops (1978)

Engage with, Protect, Regenerate and Re-enchant the places where we are

Ensnared with flowers, I fall on grass. Resting amidst cow parsley en route to Paglesham. Photo by Claire White

My friend Graham Burnett recently posted on Facebook that:

Azimuthal Projections, RetroSuburbia & Solarpunk

Azimuthal Projections is not a progressive rock album but ‘a map projection in which a region of the earth is projected on to a plane tangential to the surface, usually at a pole or the equator.’ I just came across (via Transit Maps) this azimuthal equidistant projection of Columbus, Ohio, USA which is catchily titled: