Polar bear hunting is not sport

I've just signed a petition here sending a message to the Canadian government in protest at their granting of licences to shoot polar bears for so-called 'sport'. 

I have campaigned for the rights of indigenous people to use their lands as they will, and many years ago that meant I came across the difficult question of whether this includes the right to hunt polar bears. I love polar bears beyond all other animals, I always have. If I were to choose to die, it would be by the paw of a polar bear ('I'd rather die by carnivore than by car...'). I revere these animals. My instinct is that no-one should have the right to hunt them.

But for indigenous people, such as the Chukchi people from north east Russia, hunting polar bears is a fundamental part of their identity. A young man comes of age by taking part in a polar bear hunt, and the animal's skin is then made into clothes that he will wear to hunt for the rest of his life. I have grown to accept that indigenous people have the right to wear polar bear pants. More than that, I have come to see the survival of the traditional ways of people who understand bears and their habitat sufficiently well to be able to hunt them, as a key part of polar bear conservation.

So, I am not opposed to the hunting of polar bears per se. But so-called 'sport hunting' is a totally different matter. There is no moral basis for people with no cultural or spiritual connection with polar bears to gun them down, often from helicopters. It's a disgusting practice, and one the Canadian government profits hugely from, selling polar bear hunting licences for up to 60,000 Canadian dollars.

No civilised country should tolerate this. Please join me in telling the Canadian government to stop the sale of 'sport' licences for hunting polar bears. The petition is here.

N.B. The picture is from the Bear With Us bear sanctuary.

The paper paradox

Today I returned to a role I had for almost five years, from 2005 to 2009, as co-ordinator of the European Environmental Paper Network. One of my mottoes in life is 'never go back', but I have made an exception here, and after two and a bit years, I'm putting the hat back on. At the end of my first day, I'm so glad I made the decision.

Anyone who knows me knows I'm passionate about trees and forests. I am a woodland animal and I am fierce in my desire to protect the world's forests. But I'm also a writer, and that inevitably means significant paper use.

Therein lies a paradox. On the one hand I want vast amounts of paper to come pouring off presses with my writing on it. On the other hand, I want the paper industry to stop destroying precious forests.

This paradox led me to seek answers to how paper can be sustainably produced and used, so that my literary appetite wouldn't need to be satisfied at the expense of endangered habitats or people dependent upon them. Part of the result of this search was a book, PaperTrails: from trees to trash – the true cost of paper (published by Virgin Books on 100% recycled paper and available paper free as an ebook – of course!).

The other result was that I found myself putting my energy into a growing, global campaign to push the pulp and paper industry towards a future where it is benign, sustainable and life-enriching.

At the moment there are still parts of the paper industry which are far from benign or sustainable, and as I read through some documents today I remembered why I need to return to the job of helping to transform the industry. This excerpt from a funding bid will give you a flavour:

'The paper industry uses 42% of the world’s industrial timber, more water per tonne than any other industry in industrialised countries and as much energy per tonne as steel manufacture. As well as its climate change emissions, the pulp and paper industry’s impacts include large-scale deforestation and forest degradation, human rights abuses in many countries, emission of toxic pollutants like dioxin, and more domestic waste than any other material. Globally, paper production, use and disposal are responsible for more climate change emissions than aviation, yet this has not been fully appreciated. The life-cycle of a single sheet of A4 paper causes the release of as much greenhouse gas as a light bulb left on for one hour. Just 10% of the world's population (Western Europe and North America) consume more than 50% of the world’s paper. Europeans and Americans use 6 times as much paper as the world average.

'Most if not all of the negative effects of pulp and paper production could be radically reduced: the destruction of natural and high conservation-value forests could be entirely stopped; the climate-impact of paper-production radically reduced by maximising the recycled fibre content and using best available technology; the emission of pollutants dramatically reduced by using totally chlorine free (TCF) bleaching technology. Most importantly, perhaps, the unsustainable consequences of paper production could best be mitigated by reducing the over-consumption of paper products in the most developed parts of the world. The EEPN is determined to work towards these goals in close collaboration with its members.'

And I'm proud to be working with them again.

By leaves we live

'By leaves we live' is the motto of the Scottish Poetry Library (quoting Patrick Geddes, I think), so what better place to do the research for an anthology of poems about trees? I'm very excited to be working with Saraband Press to compile an anthology, which will be based around the Gaelic Tree Alphabet but not restricted to Scottish poems. I had a list of about 80 poems, which I'd used in the A-B-Tree project events last year (see my web page on the project if you don't know what I'm talking about), but I knew there must be more tree poems out there, waiting to be discovered. Thanks to the Poetry Library I have more than doubled that number.

I just can't rave about the Scottish poetry library enough. If you have never been, and have even a passing interest in poems, you must visit the next time you're in Edinburgh. It's down towards the bottom of the Royal Mile, on the right, pretty much within shouting distance of the Parliament (that's if shouting poems is your thing). It's staffed by lovely people, has a uniquely peaceful atmosphere and it's simply packed from the basement to the attic with the best writing in the world.

I've been a friend of the library for a few years. They do free postal lending to friends, which is an absolutely brilliant service. I start each day reading poetry in bed with a cup of tea, and feeding my habit would be impossibly expensive if I couldn't lift the phone, ask for some books and receive a few days later a package of goodness for my bedside table. It means I can take wild risks, read experimentally, ask for poets I've barely heard of, and gorge myself on fat collected works that would break the bank and bend my shelves.

It also means I can read books that Amazon and the rest say are unavailable or out of print. As a poet who has two out of print books now, I know exactly what that means. It's very comforting to know that even though publishers can't (or won't) keep work available, the library is there making sure an inquisitive reader can have their curiosity satisfied.

So, I'm a long-term fan of the library, but only over the past couple of weeks have I discovered the full depths of the miracle that is their catalogue. I've used it, of course, because you can use it anywhere, which is a great help to someone for whom a round trip to the library is more than 500 miles. I fairly regularly type in the name of a poet or book title I want, to see if they have what I fancy in the lending section or only available for reference. But until I started researching the tree poem anthology, that was about the extent of my enquiries.

But now I know what treasures it contains. You can do a subject search, type in a tree species (say Birch), and up comes a list of 38 entries. Some of these are books by familiar names - The Poetry of Robert Frost is there because of his famous poem Birches - but many are by poets new to me. Even pamphlets are in there. Even the priceless concrete poetry art of Ian Hamilton Finlay. And then there are the mysterious items that are not books, but are individual poems in the Scottish Poetry Index.  These are gold dust!

Here's one: The Leaning Tree, by Robert B Shaw. Clicking on its title takes me to a page that tells me that it's in Verse. To be precise, it's in Vol. 7, no. 3 (Winter 1990); p.66. Verse is a now-extinct poetry magazine. There are masses of these, and they are the lifeblood of the poetry scene. Publication of individual poems in little magazines is how most poets get established, get their poetry seen and take part in the literary world. But the magazines are obscure, ephemeral, specialist and you can't possibly subscribe to even all of the good ones and keep pace with what's currently being published, let alone search their back lists. Except you can! Because a deity at the Scottish Poetry Library has catalogued them! 


I've done searches for all 18 species in the Gaelic Tree Alphabet, which threw up about 250 items that looked new to me or needed investigating, and I spent much of this week in Edinburgh going through my lists, in the library, checking up on them. And what treasure I have found! A Norman MacCaig poem that isn't in the big collected works; ancient Chinese writers meditating on pine; old Scots poems; Gaelic poems; poets completely new to me, like the Norwegian Olav Hauge, beautifully translated by Robin Fulton, and poets who were previously just names, like Michael Hamburger, who it turns out share my passion for trees.


Most of these discoveries would have been completely impossible without the catalogue (and all the years of data entry it must have required to build it). To all of those involved, each time I could follow the directions to an old copy of Lines Review, or West Coast Magazine, or Chapman, including even (thank you, thank you!) the page number, I offer my heartfelt gratitude. 


I felt as if there should be a shrine where I could make an offering, burn an incense stick, leave some flower petals or titbits of food. Instead, this blog post is my puja. Blessings and thanks to the Goddess of the Scottish Poetry Library Catalogue.

It's spring

Spring is declared here at the first primrose in flower on the croft, and that was yesterday morning. We actually spotted one in the woods on the south side of the loch a fortnight ago, but that doesn't count. It has to be on the croft for spring to be officially here.

The potatoes are now chitting, the onion sets are in, and various seeds are sown. Fantastic. It'll no doubt be a slow motion towards the cherry blossom and the arrival of cuckoos and warblers, and we'll no doubt have plenty of snow, sleet, hail and frost yet, but the hazel catkins are yellow already and the grass is growing fast.

Compared to the last couple of years it's an early first primrose, but there have been two even earlier in February in the past 12 years, not forgetting one completely anomalous year when we spotted one out on 28 December.

Particularly exciting yesterday was the emergence of some bees from the hive, looking pretty groggy, just doing feeble little flights, then bumbling around by the entrance. But I like to think they looked as if  they were pleased to be getting some fresh air. It's not warm enough to open up and see how they're getting on, but signs of life at all are most gratifying.

I was intrigued recently to discover that contrary to what you might expect, a really cold winter is not as hard on bees as a mild one like this one has been.When it's really cold they huddle together completely dormant and eat very little so their stores last well. During a mild winter they're less dormant, therefore need more food and there's also more condensation and that increases the risk of disease.

Willow pollen and nectar will make all the difference to the bees in the next difficult month. So you'll find me chanting under the willows, urging their catkins on.

ingos + architraves = domestic bliss

Some people do DIY. We do Domestic Bliss. Very, very slowly, our big shed (The Great Hall) gets closer to completion. Being incomplete doesn't mean it's not habitable, it simply means that on sleety days like today, progress can be made on fiddly finishing jobs. Planks of wood lurking up in the loft can be brought down, measured up, sawn, drilled and hammered, all of which is deeply satisfying, indeed blissful. 

To add to the bliss, woodwork and joinery has its own, delicious lexicon, as resinous and evocative as the scent of sawdust. Today saw the completion of the ingos and the architraves (for those that have the same understanding of these terms that I had until a few months ago, these are the wooden surrounds for windows and doors etc - ingos are the bits that go in perpendicular to the wall up to the window frame, and architraves are the overlay onto the wall to hide the joins).

So now the last two windows and all the doors have handsome wooden surrounds. They're Douglas Fir, grown in Scotland, and are currently a rather magical pale pink against the honey-coloured pine window frames. They'll darken to a deeper copper colour in time.

It is one of the perpetual pleasures of hut-life that home is built of trees. Wood smells good, it looks lovely and I know of few deeds more satisfying than sawing up bits of wood and nailing them together into something useful. I get the same, profound sense of good-job-well-done from making a basket, but today woodwork is the business.

And miraculously, neither of injured ourselves at all today - no cuts, no hammered thumbs, no aching backs.
Pure bliss.

The croft - turret

There's a patch of ground at the top of the croft which belongs to me, and on it a proper house was planned. For a while. As part of the plan, an access track was put in, and while the digger was there it was supposed to dig some test holes to check where the bedrock was for the structural engineer. It dug and dug, finding only a seam of fracturing rock, until I cried about the devastation and called a halt. The result is a big hole, which is now a pond, and the house plan on indefinite hold. Since then, recession and caution on the part of mortgage lenders means that it's unlikely I could ever get the finance together to build, and anyway, who needs a house when you've got a caravan on the shore, several sheds, and a turret?

The turret is actually a B&Q potting shed, at the top of a wooded crag, with a stunning view of the mountains and the sea. It's my private writing place. It used to have a wood-burning stove in it, but the chimney leaked and the stove was rubbish, so I've ripped it out. It's in an implausibly exposed position, but it's tied down to its foundations with lorry straps but even so part of the roofing came off in a recent storm. It's repaired again now, and dry once more.

I always loved Rapunzel. Now I too can let down my hair.

The croft - downstairs toilet

The little caravan down on the shore of Loch Roe needed a toilet and this is what we came up with. A good use for an old, holed boat. It blows down every now and again in big gales, but it's been there now for 10 years.

Almost but not quite visible is the toilet itself - a standard sawdust composting bucket with a normal toilet seat. The view is out over Loch Roe, and the tree shelter makes it feel quite private, especially in summer when all the birches are in full leaf.

It was such a glorious day today that we had a picnic down at the shore, on the decking in front of the caravan, basking in sunshine. The loch was flat calm, so the shoreline, the buoys and every island were all mirrored in the water. Also basking were about a dozen seals, and as the sun warmed them, they steamed. It was quite magical - each seal perfectly reflected, complete with its little cloud.