October: Hell is other people.
THEFT and GRAFFITI. The Local Consultation. The new tree nursery. The £50 food hamper winner. Anti-volunteering and why this project needs support for its support.
Getting the community involved.
The shipping container got decorated again and I hesitated about whether to paint over it. What political ramifications might come back to me if I do? These are the territorial leg-raisings of someone angry, after all. But I admit, their artwork has improved.
It’s more emphatic, perhaps my message to them “You can grow” (see pic) had inspired them - there is better expression and care… but to heck with them - I begin to slap green gloss paint to cover it up. A passing dog-owner of about 60 years of age heckles as she walks past:
You’ll be having to do that again in a day or two!
Thanks luv, I needed that.
Hell is other people, said Jean Paul Sartre.
I look like I’m doing community payback some days, but actually, I’m a volunteer.
Sartre would have laughed and I hope, cheered.
Willow Worlds - The Consultation
The Consultation exercise documents were prepared with the help of Chat GPT and a local printing company. We made 250 leaflets and promised a Lucky Draw for a £50 Food Hamper for participants completing the consultation online or by a follow-up phone call.
Analysis of the Consultation Results.
We predicted that from 250 fliers we might get 25 to 50 meaningful responses.
We only got 10. This disappointment requires discussion later.
The consultation and its results went as follows:
Question 1: Have you ever seen willow “fence-hedges” like this one in the photo?
Prediction: We predicted that less than 10% would respond ‘yes’ to this.
Respondents were more familiar with our existing 'fedge’ than predicted.
:
Question 2: Do you think they could be used to protect trees from roe deer in Muiredge Park?
Prediction: We predicted that most respondents would hedge: ‘maybe’.
Respondents were more optimistic than we predicted:
Question 3: Willow Worlds is a project which intends to plant 2 willow small areas in the middle of the long grass in Muiredge Park. These will protect some of the tree plantations from deer and help them to grow better. In size, they will each be about 15 meters across.
How do you feel about the proposal to plant some willow fence-hedge in Muiredge Park to protect trees from deer?
Prediction: We predicted that the average would be neutral.
Respondents were a lot more positive than we predicted.
Question 4: This Willow Fedge can be found in Bat’s Wood behind Levenmouth Academy.
Do you have any concerns or suggestions regarding the planting of willow fence hedges?
Prediction: objections on the grounds that dogs might get into them and leave their faeces and owners would not be able to get in to bag them, objections on the grounds of fire risk and vandalism, leaves falling and making the place messy in winter.
Respondents voiced no concerns or suggestions whatsoever.
Question 5: Would you be interested in finding out more about the planting, maintenance and benefits of willow fedge structures?
We predicted a very low level of interest.
Respondents were more interested than we predicted.
Question 6: Please enter a phone number if you would like to be contacted to discuss the project.
We predicted 5 responses, most of them negative.
Results: We made only 2 phone calls and both of them were positive and without any objections or concerns. Both were offers to get involved.
Competition
Winner: Wendy Bell.
Question 7: Please provide your email address if you would like lifetime free access to the Willow Worlds Substack.
We predicted that we might get 5 positive responses, possibly gain 2-3 interested volunteers at the maximum.
Results: we got 6 positive responses. One more than predicted.
Conclusion
We conclude that the consultation was successful and no objections have been raised. The low response rate should be couched in a discussion of volunteering and other unpaid work generally, and in areas of high social deprivation in particular. We note that knocking on doors was an unpopular idea. Without a significant investment of time and effort, we simply lacked the resources to soft sell the project beyond what we did. The sample though small was however, we hope, representative.
Volunteering in decline.
Volunteering and other unpaid work (participation in organised groups of any kind) has been on the decline since the advent of TV. In 2000, in a book called Bowling Alone, Robert M. Putnam described these changes in western society in what became a landmark study. Now you know.
It is a story of the fracturing of the social fabric of the West, largely due to competition from TV broadcasts and other societal changes since 1930. TV, the PC, then cable TV (e.g MTV, 1981), then satellite TV (e.g. Sky, 1990), then the World Wide Web (1995) are all well described and implicated in graphs depicting declines in social cohesion and community life and volunteer work. We can fill in the blanks since then: Google (1998), Web 2.0 (1999), YouTube (2003), Facebook (2004), Twitter (2006), the iPhone 3 (2010) and then the roll out of 4G networks basically everywhere. We have been rewired and isolated, see for example Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation (2024).
But, for one glorious moment in 2015, the world seemed to be doing well out of all this connectivity (except in Syria). America was developing a health service, Brits were having a sensible debate about why we should stay in Europe and, everyone was waking up to the climate crisis at the Paris COP. I started my Masters Degree in Learning for Sustainability and completing my first half-ironman. 2015 really didn’t feel like the peak of a naive complacency, we were all working quite hard after all, however it soon went south.
In Aug 2016, Levenmouth Academy opened and taught its first pupils. This was either the straw that broke the back of the liberal West or just an unfortunate coincidence. We got Brexit, President Trump ripped up the Paris Agreement and I got arthritis. I’m supposed to be writing a paragraph about why and how volunteering and unpaid social work hit the skids but the historical context matters. I think it’s plain to everyone that 2015 will become a time-travellers’ choice destination for 21st century experiences in the modern west. 2015 was, in retrospect, the good year, ending so hopefully - things were OK, Brexit and Trump were remote risks, the Paris Agreement of COP21 gave us hope that the governments of the world really could…
2024 is a land of confusion, that’s where we are. Trump is looming, everyone seems to be getting out of jail and at the moment the world has agreed that ‘global heating’ is a thing, scientists mention that end of the AMOC current could mean ice-age conditions for Scotland even though we’ve totally blown the Paris 1.5C temperature change target. More and more people are doing less and less, I can’t even write an article without using Chat GPT to make sure I’m making sense.
From Bowling Alone (2000) to the present day, we know that the community-spirit sector has become tougher to get volunteers for. Not only that, there are some places have less volunteers than others.
Ah-ha. Now, this is a thorny issue, because we might ask unhelpful questions like: who has more community spirit, Glenrothes or Buckhaven? And I’d get absolute pelters for that one and rightly so. Also, I’m sure that there are local worthies everywhere who would refute whatever I try to say about their place in terms of how it lacks a volunteering spirit. They are the volunteering spirits after all, but I contend that there’s fewer of them than before. The fact that the few we have are so celebrated is telling. This is an inconvenient truth about the state of the world.
Worse.
There is sometimes a moral argument against doing voluntary work.
Not in words, because arguing about it would count as voluntary work. The argument isn’t even made - it floats in the slough of despond. The moral case against doing voluntary work isn’t pretty, nobody even likes to look at it. It lies scattered like the pieces of a jigsaw that nobody wants to make. Someone trying to be a researcher, has to put the argument together. That’ll be me.
Exhibit One: seen in CLEAR’s Sandwell Street workshop.
“Money’s too tight to mention.” Simply Red (1985)
“Get Rich, or Die Tryin’” 50 Cent/Eminem (2003)
“[I’m not helping because] that’s effort.”
“Dropping litter gives somebody a job.”
“Nae bother.”
Clears voice for a monologue:
“I’m not going to do anything that isn’t fixing my biggest problem - money. I won’t work for nothing, I work only to solve my [family’s] problem and the reason why I feel angry and ashamed at how there’s no food [at my house]. I’d rather you thought I was lazy than as poor as I feel. I’m not even going to worry about putting my own litter in the bin - that’s [a waste of my] effort.”
Creative Non-Fiction.
That last quote is what researchers call ‘creative non-fiction’ - I have written more than I have heard from any one person but I’ve tried to distill the feelings of some people I can name. This is almost an attempt to go telepathic. In my defence, I did discuss this ‘argument’ with someone and I’m fairly certain this is, or at least was at the time, their moral outlook. It was immoral to work for nothing, they had the moral courage to say ‘no’ to all voluntary work, even holding on to an empty crisp packet - no!
Refusing to put aside one’s feelings of being crushed by deprivation is understandable. I read Poverty Safari (2018) by Darren McGarvey ages ago. I’m not going to summarise it for you but this is one idea eloquently covered by that book, and it opened my eyes and ears a bit.
The idea that there is nobility in refusing to do any unpaid work is more real than I like to think. I’m not saying that it’s common, it is not. It is marginalised even in a marginalised community. It is unusual, but adding it to the more conventional views has some explanatory power because even if only a few people think this way, it changes the atmosphere of a community, I think.
You probably think that it is illogical or that there is something wrong with it - of course, I agree - there is something wrong with it. But if you were there, in the lived experience of povert - would you be able to resist this turpitude and make the “right” choices? Of course, I’d like to think we would: you, me, Mother Theresa and Nelson Mandela would double-down on our principles. But you must admit that there must be some people crushed by above-average problems who would fall for it.
Against this narrative comes the familiar, logical-to-us argument that cannot understand why people don’t just do-the-right-thing. This is the meritocracy: the rags-to-riches storyline and the belief in the vindication of the righteous sufferer. It is the reason why a job application wants to see your voluntary work and achievements. If you have no job in post-industrial capitalism, the rational argument goes, then you should have plenty of time for voluntary work and wider achievements. If you live in an area with loads of litter, you could at least go litter picking. I’m not against this argument, of course, but if all the other people are nobly doing nothing - you’d need a thick skin to pick up their litter without getting paid.
This brings me to Peter Wright (aged 81) - he might buck the trend?
The first time I saw Peter, about 10 years ago, I’m sorry to say that I thought he was a maniac. Rain, hail or snow he was out doing his litter-picking enthusiastically and in hi-viz jacket and a kilt. It’s not normal to wear a kilt in Scotland by the way, and to do it while litter picking is at least thought-provoking. Only last year, did I actually meet Peter and find out that he’s a straight forward no-nonsense guy - a patriotic citizen rather than anything else. He’s taking the punishment out of community service and I admire him for that. He’s leading the fight against apathy, and that is the hardest battle there is!
But at 81 years of age, he’s not doing it to improve his employment prospects or his CV. That actually underlines my point: where is everyone else?
Where are the young litter picking volunteers in areas of high unemployment, doing it to improve their employment prospects and their CVs?
Visitors from Planet Meritocracy believe places of high unemployment should be literally heaving with wannabe upwardly mobile volunteers, like Oliver Twist! Why not? When they instead see low levels of voluntary work, they believe that those who merit rewards must live elsewhere. They ask: Why don’t unemployed people do more? Don’t they realise that there is a link between well-being and volunteering? They shrug and return to Planet Meritocracy: where everyone works for good money, everyone volunteers and all the children are above average. For fuller wide ranging discussion of the British middle class mindset read George Orwell (1939) on what he’s got against Charles Dickens.
Anyway, things are rapidly getting out of kilter.
Celebrating volunteering is definitely the narrative that I would support. By praising and high-lighting stories of the volunteers the fight to change an apathetic culture is being fought by CLEAR, Volunteering Matters and just about every charity there is. My point is that it is a fight, and making it look easy is also part of the fight. In this light the previous pages are probably unhelpful, even if they are truthful - so maybe we could start again without all this waffle.
Yes. It’s time to make the point more forcefully and a lot more directly, to heck with discussions of motivations, lived experience and the trauma of relative poverty…
Let’s just nail things down with some statistics and a few words, now:
The Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation (SIMD).
The reasons why there’s too few volunteers in this community can be found, not in the moral reasoning of a few angry people but in the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation (SIMD).
Looking at things through the SIMD lens, rather than the lens of meritocracy, the question of why volunteering rates are low here is obvious. In areas with less money, more crime, poorer housing, poorer health and fewer skills - it seems plain disingenuous to expect equal or higher rates of voluntary activity.
So that’s that, we get it.
This brings us to the next question:
What extra support strategies will our project use to enable the community to participate?
My poor reader might be relieved that the ‘support strategies’ have finally arrived. Unfortunately they are not in the form of a caffeinated, alcoholic pick-me-up from the monks of the abbey of Buckfast. They are instead, a couple of what I think are, cunning ruses.
Create community assets.
Spend the money twice.
Now. Nobody hates reading the instructions more than a chap like me. So I’m not going to explain these cunning ruses in an instruction manual style. Instead I have some wee stories of how we are put them into action this month.
The Air-Pruning Tree Nursery Table.
As you might know, I had been trying to do a bit more with film having gotten inspired by working with Gavin from Midgiebite Media on a Climate Beacon Film project which did wildly better than I thought it would. The film was called Levenmouth: A Climate Beacon? and got over 2.5k views and the Fife Climate Change Action Network gave us a further grant to do another film for the Climate Festival of October 2024.
Unfortunately, my dad died and I didn’t feel like making a film last month. The best I could do was redirect the remainder of the grant to building a new type of tree nursery. I actually only met Colin and Haley from Treewilding CIC at a Tree Wardens event the month before and by happy coincidence, they could build a specially designed ‘Air-Pruning Tree Nursery’ for £375 which was just about the same amount as the FCCAN funding we had left.
Trees grown in air pruning nurseries have better roots than the alternative which is pot-bound trees. Exactly how this works can be studied here. Colin and Haley have identified a gap in the market for air-pruning tree nurseries at small scale and the one they have made for us in Kirkcaldy Walled Garden is very promising.
This builds an asset in the long term for our tree planting efforts. It’s a local place to grow saplings for a full 2 years before planting. These trees will be more resilient with a real root ball and not just a tap root tying itself in knots at the bottom of the pot. The plastic-free dimension is not lost on us either - OK there is a little long term plastic mesh at the bottom of the table but nothing compared to the pots and packaging usually involved in tree nurseries. In case you are wondering - there is a solar water pump to irrigate the tree nursery properly and that’s one reason why the thing costs over £300 to make, it’s not shown in the photos as we are preparing for winter.
Disambiguation: Treewilding CIC vs Treewilding (the book).
There is actually an amazing new book which I just read called Treewilding. Nothing to do with Treewilding CIC, except that they are both excellent! The book Treewilding by Jake M. Robinson (2024) can be ordered direct from their brilliant publishers Pelagic Publishing. It is an excellent work and I particularly enjoyed Chapter 12: Sea of Tree Guards which basically agrees with the logic of Willow Worlds without actually discussing our strategy. If you order the hardback from the publisher they can send it with a 25% discount if you sign up to their free newsletter. It’s a no-brainer, you save £5 and that’s one Christmas present sorted. Of course a more adventurous present would be the £375 tree nursery; provided that you can persuade Treewilding CIC to come and build it for you.
And the winner is…
The £50 food hamper consisted of jams, honey, apple juice and chutneys from CLEAR Community Kitchen on Sandwell Street (Food Miles: Zero). The gherkins alone could have fetched £50 in the bazaars of Marrakesh and Spencer but instead they got eaten locally by Wendy Bell and family, of Swallow Crescent, Buckhaven. This is an example of ‘spending money twice’. In return for completing the consultation, someone got a load of free food and the CLEAR community kitchen got a quick £50 which is good news for that charity’s bank accounts which should in turn support local participation.
Another example of spending money twice comes from how the leaflets were distributed. School pupils were offered a community engagement activity on the last afternoon of term - stuffing letter boxes. In return for this work, Willow Worlds will buy the 3 pupils involved tickets to Go Ape! and, when enough pupils have contributed to the project, send them all on a fun day out into a forest adventure park. Rewarding involvement is a supportive strategy for participation in the project, but it also creates a reward systems for pupil engagement at school (they still have to earn their seat on the bus) and the actual cash will support Go Ape! whose fun, forest-adventure experiences do so much to inspire a love of trees.
These 2 cunning examples of spending money twice both offering a reward and buying from causes we aim to support, puts money into the community directly and in a circular way. Calories from local supplier who earns cash to do more local regeneration work. Tickets for outdoor adventures in return for community engagement which also supports engagement at school. I suppose I could call it “boomerang cashflow” but I think that’s too corny. I’m sticking with the more conventional idea of spending money twice which is what the banks do all the time.
Side-note.
Spending money twice is particularly clever seeing it’s October and the money from the grant hasn’t even arrived yet! There are a few invoices waiting patiently right now…
Epilogue.
“It takes a long spoon to sup with a Fifer.” - Scottish proverb, 14th Century.
The proverb about Fifers apparently means that the people of Fife are particularly tight fisted, mean and suspicious of each other. As a Fifer, in our defence, the problem with living on a peninsula is that anyone out to steal anything has less world to steal from. So without increasing the incidence of crime in the average Fifer, the places of Fife are more likely to suffer a loss from theft because so much of the surrounding environs is cold, dark sea water. Thus, I believe, the people of Fife rightly fear and suspect each other because of its physical geography! Geography is all around - indeed! It’s a peninsula of paranoia, said someone… else.
I wandered up to admire the willow plantation on October 20th. I was thinking that it was nearly, but not quite, the right time to start cutting the willow and harvesting. November is the start of that season. I was there to admire the yellowing leaves of the fedge plantation and do a bit of weaving - bending some small branches back into the fedge to avoid pruning them. When I approached my heart sank, it looked like some parts hadn’t grown as much as I had thought - then I realised: Success had become a thinkable thing, and then it had, yet again, exploded!
Someone had been cutting the willow for themselves without my permission!
Yes. My poor, now surely exhausted, reader. I’m going off on another rant. We were on the cusp of success. We had completed a local consultation exercise which ran blissfully and without complaints. Literally days after the consultation told people how it could provide useful materials - someone came and helped themselves to it!
The cuts were neat and orderly, made with a good quality lopper and probably enough for a good-sized garden project somewhere. At first, I confess - I was annoyed and para like any normal Fifer would be. However, staying with the trouble, I felt there was a better way to look at the issue: someone had benefited. We have literally oodles of willow to cut anyway and a lot of it is fairly safe from theft. So I quelled my inner-rage as a Fifer suspicious of all comers and takers. I convinced myself that this was a case of benefit - someone local felt they were winning. Happy days. Besides, the whole point of community willow would be moments such as these where people came and took what they wanted from these here bountiful commons.
I’m still going to track them down somehow…
“Comedy surrounds us. It is abundant in our daily lives. It does not require rigorous spiritual discipline. It requires only that we remain the adaptive critters we are, that we appreciate the survival value, the power of comedy, that we not get caught up in the melodrama, the literally dead end of tragedy.” Shagbark Hickory (2004)
Remaining the adaptive critters we are.
Yes. Let’s remain the adaptive critters we are.
That’s almost all for this month. I’m never quite sure how to end these posts, they seem simply to run out of words rather than end in some dignified way. I really should find out how to end posts - let me end with a promise to find out how best to end a long monthly post.
I promise.
OK.
Bye.
Disambiguation:
Shagbark Hickory - human.
Shagbark Hickory (Carya ovata) - tree.
If you want to give yourself a cool name in environmental education, appropriating a species of tree might not be the way to go. Google searches will get you confused with actual trees, it took me ages to verify that Shagbark Hickory is a fairly, but not completely, unknown Canadian academic and not a talking hickory tree. His epic 2004 paper on comedy will live forever in some circles within environmental education.
References
Haidt, J. (2024) The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. (London: Penguin)
Hickory, S. (2004). Everyday environmental ethics as comedy and story: A collage. Canadian Journal of Environmental Education, 9, 71-81. Quoted in Fawcett, L. “Feral Sociality and (Un)natural Histories” in Eds. McKenzie, Hart, Bai & Jickling. (2009). Fields of green: Restorying culture, environment, and education.
Higgins, P. & Brian Wattchow (2013) The water of life: creative non-fiction and lived experience on an interdisciplinary canoe journey on Scotland's River Spey, Journal of Adventure Education & Outdoor Learning, 13:1, 18-35, DOI: 10.1080/14729679.2012.702526
McGarvey, D. (2017) Poverty Safari: Understanding the Anger of Britain’s Under Class. (Glasgow: Arcade Publishing).
Orwell, G. (1939) Essays (Chapter 5). http://www.online-literature.com/orwell/orwell_dickens/5/
Robinson, J.M. (2024) Treewilding: our past, present and future relationship with forests. (London: Pelagic Publishing)