Richard Lindsay – Page 8 – Richard Lindsay: Environment Arts and Letters

Myland wildlife, Colchester : 25th April 2016

Trains chaos today so I was working at home and assumed that there would be no photography – especially as the weather was so grey and wet – but the wildlife came to me..!
I was just having a coffee break when I heard all sorts of screeching and swearing outside. Peering out of the living room window I saw two jays having a battle royal with a magpie – again!…(see previous post, along with robins, yellowhammers and all sorts…. Myland wildlife, Colchester 21st April 2016).
By the time I’d grabbed the camera (as usual, click on images to see larger versions) the fight had stopped and the jays were sitting in the branches of the oak trees opposite us, peering down at their tormentor, while the magpie strutted around looking as though it owned the small green around the oaks.

The magpie had a good poke around and found something edible:

Then a couple of wood pigeons came crashing down onto the green and proceeded to do a ‘Lambeth Walk’ beside each other before piling into each other with no holds barred, then doing the Lambeth Walk again – really quite funny, although I’ve never seen wood pigeons act with such venom before;

This was too much for the magpie, who flew off to taunts from the jays.
One of the jays then started poking around in the ivy covering one of the oaks, apparently finding something juicy:

The other jay stalked along the ditch at the foot of the oaks, tossing leaves aside:

Then it hopped up onto the green and started looking intently for something:

Eventually it started digging furiously with its bill, tugging at something, and I assumed that it had found a juicy worm or beetle:

Then with an almost audible ‘pop’, the jay pulled out an acorn from the soil:

It flew up into the oak tree and spent a few blissful minutes gorging on its un-buried treasure.

It seems that there are no such things as quiet wildlife days in Myland…

What the Commuter Saw : 21st April 2016

After the blue skies and high cirrus of early morning (see earlier post), things steadily clouded over during the morning. The journey down to the station was enlivened, however, by the fact that the time of year has come for mallards to be choosing bizarre places to think about nesting. Note that she doesn’t entirely trust her male guards to alert her to danger (click on images to see larger versions):

The sky was still streaked with high cirrus as we swept past St Andrew’s Church, Marks Tey courtesy of Abellio Greater Anglia en-route to Stratford from Colchester.

…and there was even still a fair amount of blue sky over the oil-seed rape fields as we headed towards Kelvedon, although the cirrus was thickening into bands of cirrostratus:

Towards Chelmsford, however, a truly weird bank of cloud developed, looming over New Hall School, just east of Chelmsford. It looked as though it couldn’t make up its mind whether to be threatening stratocumulus, pannus or full-blown mamma:

After Chelmsford, the view south towards Galleywood and Billericay had a sky full of cirrostratus blotting out all signs of blue sky, beneath which were thickening bands of stratocumulus with praecipitatio giving everything beneath a good shower:

Things just remained grey and damp for the rest of the day…

Myland wildlife, Colchester : 21st April 2016

Up early again last Thursday, though not before dawn this time. The sky was looking rather interesting so it was a case of grabbing wellies, coats and cameras and heading off out into the fields. The sky was streaked with high cirrus (click on images for larger versions):

It feels distinctly as though the birdlife is more casual about human presence early in the morning. Blue-tits, blackbirds, great-tits all seemed largely un-bothered as I walked past:

Then I became aware that I was also being watched – by a normally-timid woodpigeon attempting to look like an ivy leaf:

Walking along the farm track there seemed to be a great deal of activity associated with a hedge up ahead, while the sky continued to do its cirrus thing:

A robin seemed to feel that it owned the hedge:

Meanwhile I was being scolded by a blue-tit who was busy hunting insects in the blackthorn flowers in the bushes behind me, although it decided against outright confrontation:

…when a flash of colour in the corner of my eye caught my attention. A jay flew into the same blackthorn bushes. It soon became obvious that it was flying back and forth between the field behind the blackthorn and a location some way down the hedge in front of me, carrying twigs for nest-building. Eventually I realised that there were two, operating in relays, and it was fascinating to watch the fact that they flew through the air like swimmers through water, giving a flap then gliding with wings against the body before flapping again. Approaching the nesting hedge they always did a spectacular braking flare:

Then suddenly all hell broke loose. The jays started screeching like a cockatoo with laryngitis, actually jumping up and down with anger, and I realised that a magpie had sneaked into their hedge from the far side, to investigate their nest. There was a huge amount of flapping, barging and swearing, until eventually the magpie fled into a nearby tree-top, chased by the jays. Eventually one of them looked down at me as if to say, “Well, what do you think of that? The cheek of it..!!”

Then to round off a thoroughly exciting early morning stroll, a pair of yellowhammers leapt out of the hedge as I was heading home and perched on the hedge-top, providing a lovely view of them:

…and so, home past the fields of sprouting wheat, then off to work…

Etsy shop open

Apologies for the silence but it’s been a busy couple of months at the university producing a range of environmental material for partner organisations. More about that over the next few weeks.

In the meantime, and given that Etsy provides a rather simpler shop set-up than building my own web-store, I’ve also now created a RichardLindsayArts store on Etsy to complement my existing web-store, which will itself have a major overhaul shortly.

There’s just a few items in the Etsy store at the moment to establish the various types of products, but I’ll be filling the store with more items over the next two or three weeks.

On-line store Download image purchase update

On-line store update :

Images for download purchase are proving more arduous to set up in store than initially appeared. Consequently uploading all the files currently available in the shop image galleries for printed photos will take a some days to achieve for the Downloadable photographs section of the store, but I’ll aim to add at least a few per day. Image details (species names and so on) will also be expanded upon later.

On-line store now open!

After a steep learning-curve worthy of the Matterhorn, the on-line store for Richard Lindsay Arts and Letters officially opened today.

To enter the store, either click on the Store button top-right on the front page of this blog site, or go direct to richardlindsayartsandletters.com

The store offers the opportunity to purchase (at very modest prices) prints of the various photographic images that have featured here or on the linked Facebook page. It also offers larger canvas prints at slightly less modest prices, plus the opportunity to purchase full-sized download version of these (again, at modest prices, although if the download is for commercial use it would be kind if you could e-mail richard@richardlindsayartsandletters to discuss reasonable terms). The store also offers a small selection of lino prints, printed cards of lino prints, plus a small selection of other original artworks, although the plan is to add to this artwork collection in the coming months.

The in-store photographic collection is still being added to so does not yet fully reflect the range of images in the galleries here or posted on the Facebook pages, but everything should be harmonized within a month or so.

Update – Sphagnum bog moss and salmon steak

It’s two months now since the launch of Moors for the Future’s Community Science Project and three months since I packed a fresh salmon steak into a bag of Sphagnum bog moss to be opened during my talk at the launch (see earlier blog) in order to demonstrate the preservative power of sphagnan, a chemical released from the tissues of Sphagnum bog moss. Having put the steak back in the Sphagnum at the end of the day, I brought it home and left it in our small plastic greenhouse, in the shade beneath a work-bench.

It was with some trepidation and with some serious thought given to whether I should wear an industrial face-mask that I decided to open up the Sphagnum bag the other day to see what had happened since then. Actually I had two bags of Sphagnum because I had taken another up to Hathersage to show what the contens of a WW1 First Field Dressing consisted of, and I couldn’t now tell which bag was which. I opened the first bag gingerly, at arm’s length, and immediately decided that this could not be the bag because there was no stench and no obvious sign of the salmon steak. I therefore opened the second bag, also at arm’s length, but was surprised to find that again there was no foul odour or runny slime. Poking around in the bag it eventually became clear that there was no salmon in this bag, so I turned back to the first one again.

Carefully working my way through the compressed Sphagnum, I finally found a somewhat compressed salmon steak (well, I had packed the bag quite tightly when I re-sealed it so it wouldn’t go off on the train home) with various bits of Sphagnum clinging to it. Peeling away this Sphagnum I was amazed to find that there was absolutely no odour at all, even sniffing right up to the steak, and although it looked a bit shrivelled and a little brown in places, I could imagine that it would still be edible after it was cooked – provided you were a hungry viking..! With preservative power like this, it’s hardly surprising that peat bogs manage to preserve so much of themselves – and thus so much carbon – on millennial timescales. A very relevant thought, given that the Paris Climate Talks begin today…

Minories Christmas Market

The Minories Gallery here in Colchester is holding a Christmas Market on Saturday 28th November 2015 featuring a whole range of local artists, designers and craftspeople. I have a stall there and the whole event looks as through it’s going to be enormously enjoyable: MINORIES CHRISTMAS MARKET 2015 POSTER

Nature sells – powerful proof of our need for Nature

Most of us now live in cities or urban environments because, since around 2008, the human species has transformed itself from Homo sapiens ruralensis into Homo sapiens urbanensis. The human population has moved the centre of its distribution from the rural setting to the urban jungle and our everyday links with the natural world are therefore, arguably, weakening. The Oxford Junior Dictionary has dispensed with the word ‘acorn’ (albeit to much horrified adult comment) on the grounds that words such as acorn, lark and minnow have much less relevance to young people today than terms such as blog, download and broadband. Fears for the health, welfare and safety of our children in urban settings combine with formal Health & Safety regulations to ensure that the favoured areas for play today are constructed areas of climbing frames, spinning poles and scrambling nets, sometimes outdoor, sometimes indoors in great warehouses, rather than the trees, bush-dens, and yes, even ponds and streams which were playgrounds for those of us who are now of a certain age.

Successive governments of all hues, not just in the UK but worldwide, have with a few notable exceptions tended to offer little more than lip-service to environmental issues and pursued the lightest-touch form of executive environmental action because they believe that what people really care about now is physical and financial security rather than butterflies, birds and wild flowers. They are almost certainly correct, at least at one level, but this attitude is based on the belief that Nature is an optional extra to be given consideration only when the important things in life have been sorted out. In other words, Nature is no longer believed to be important to the investment-fund manager in Canary Wharf or the tech-startup team in Hoxton or the hospital cleaner living in Manchester’s Moss Side because they all live, like most of us, in the urban environment. There is one industry, however, and arguably one of the largest contributors to the UK economy, which gives the lie to this belief and shows just how important Nature is even to the most hardened urbanite, though they themselves may not be aware of any positive feelings towards Nature.

To demonstrate this, I want you to do something for me – and no, I don’t want you to go outside and hug a tree. I just want you to sit and watch TV. A commercial channel. When a commercial break arrives, watch each advert and try to spot how many ‘natural’ references there are in each advert. It may be a floral pattern on wallpaper, or a flower-bed, or a mountain, or a zebra, or a flower in a vase, or a bird flying, or a wild landscape. Now consider what relevance that natural reference has to the product being advertised in each case. I am fairly confident that an astonishingly high proportion of the adverts you have just watched will contain one or more natural references. I am also reasonably confident that many of those references will be of little direct relevance to the product being marketed.

Now why should both these facts be? Advertising has no interest in Nature per se. It is a hard-headed industry in the business of making money for its clients. Ultimately, however, advertising is about making us feel good and therefore seeking to associate the product with a sense of well-being. If something makes us feel good, we are more likely to want it. This hard-headed industry knows precisely what, deep down, makes us happy. It is abundantly clear that a young futures trader who lives and works in Canary Wharf is deeply attracted to the idea of driving the latest high-performance car through wild rugged landscapes, through a scenery of lush green alpine meadows, along wild coastlines – in short, through Nature. This is clearly the case because this is what such adverts consist of, and the advertising industry understands the mind of our young futures trader better than anyone. Take almost any other product, even the most unlikely of products – the insurance market, or should I say the insurance meerkat? Meerkat?? What’s that got to do with insurance…?? It doesn’t have anything to do with insurance of course, but it has everything to do with the successful marketing of insurance.

As far as I’m aware there’s been very little published in this country about the obvious underlying attraction of Nature and the use of this by the advertising industry, but there’s an interesting pilot study by Rainer Brämer in German which looks at the phenomenon in Germany, and there’s also a German blog by Martin Rasper which makes a number of valuable and enlightening points. But does a viscerally, almost subconsciously positive, response to Nature mean that we actually want to engage with natural things, that we want more Nature?

Again, the advertising industry gives us an interesting insight. Where do the captains of this hard-headed industry go when they wish to relax, or when they have made their millions and retire? Very often they head for the beautiful countryside or to the un-spoiled places of the World, as do so many other captains of industry. There is probably a direct relationship between how rich someone is and the amount of time they spend in surroundings which are full of natural references. Sometimes these settings can be quite literally manicured to within an inch of their lives (some Japanese shogunate gardens still have lawns and trees trimmed with nail scissors) because many successful people are also various degrees of control obsessive, but even so their evident need for natural contact is still strong. Edward O. Wilson wrote extensively about this strong link, which he called ‘biophilia’, but there is a tendency among decision-makers, policy makers and general movers and shakers to regard this concept as too nebulous to quantify and turn into something economically meaningful. Advertising does precisely this. It calculates the economic benefit to the client of using specific triggers within an advert. As a measure of what Nature means to us in hard monetary terms, advertising is something of a revelation. “Add a giraffe. Your sales will increase by 35%”. This is a powerful argument because it applies across the whole spectrum of society.

There is something of a downside to this, however – or perhaps at least an unexplored issue. When advertisements use actors they must be paid. Nature has no voice and cannot ask to be paid. In effect, one of the most powerful tools of the advertising industry can be used for free by anyone for any purpose. There are occasions where the use of Nature in order to sell a product ultimately may have a negative effect on Nature itself. It is rather like other industries 100 years ago which were able to extract water from river systems, use it for their industrial process and then pump the waste water back into the river with no thought or responsibility for the impact on the river system. That system has now been replaced by the ‘polluter pays’ principle, and industry has adapted accordingly to the benefit of everyone.

There is perhaps therefore an argument for the advertising industry to have its own version of this principle, whereby a ‘natural actor’ used in an advertisement ‘receives payment’ for its contribution to the creation of the advert. This could be achieved using the same type of mechanism as operated by the Landfill Tax Credit Scheme. Each advert and each broadcast/publication of an advert could pay a small supplement to a Natural Advertising Tax (NATural Ad) Scheme which would provide funds for projects which enhanced the natural environment of local communities and/or perhaps gave opportunities for those living in nature-deprived urban settings to get out and enjoy contact with the natural world. Given the pervasive nature of Nature, I suspect that the default position for all adverts would be that they should pay into the NATural Ad Scheme and it would be up to the advertising agency to demonstrate that a particular advert did not fall within the scheme. If the supplement were sufficiently small, such arguments would be largely pointless in any case.

Given what we receive from Nature, whether consciously or subconsciously, and its enormous contribution to the mass of advertising by which we are all bombarded every day, and the huge contribution that advertising makes to the national economy, a scheme such as NATural Ad would seem both reasonable and a small price to pay. Whether or not such a scheme were ever to be instigated, politicians, decisions, planners, policy makers and financiers would do well to look to the advertising industry for a real sense of how important Nature is to all of us. Advertising is here to stay, but just imagine advertising stripped of all references to Nature – what a bleak and rather soul-less world that would be…

Picture credits
Acorn: free photos – flickr creative commons licence
Canary Wharf: Richard Lindsay
Mazda MX-5 ND: Yarin Asanth – flickr creative commons licence
Meerkat: Van Corey – flickr creative commons licence
Giraffe: Peter Miller – flickr creative commons licence

Information sources

Oxford Junior Dictionary decision to drop ‘nature-related’ words: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jan/13/oxford-junior-dictionary-replacement-natural-words
UK Advertising Industry: http://www.statista.com/topics/1747/advertising-in-the-united-kingdom/
and http://www.theworkfoundation.com/downloadpublication/report/295_the%20contribution%20of%20advertising%20to%20the%20uk%20economy%20311011.pdf
Advertising contribution to the UK economy: http://www.thinkbox.tv/tv-at-a-glance/advertising-pays-how-advertising-fuels-the-uk-economy/
Nature and advertising study by Rainer Brämer: http://www.wanderforschung.de/files/natwerb1241108152.pdf
Nature and advertising blog by Martin Rasper: http://www.utopia.de/magazin/nature-sells-wie-puma-jaguar-co-die-werbung-beeinflussen
Edward O. Wilson and Biophilia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biophilia_hypothesis

The amazing Sphagnum bog moss – from WW1 to the Climate War

At 07:30 on 1st June 1916, Private Tommy Atkins scrambled out of a forward trench in the British front lines and advanced across No Man’s Land towards the German trenches. He was taking part in the Battle of Albert, the opening phase of the Battle of the Somme. He had covered no more than 30 yards when he felt as if someone had hit him on the back of the head with a mallet. At the same time his rifle dropped uselessly to the broken chalky ground. Checking himself dazedly, he realized that he must have taken a bullet in the left shoulder because the whole shoulder area was suddenly bright crimson. Private Tommy Atkins had just become one of the 57, 470 British casualties on the now-notorious First Day of the Somme.

Shock meant that he could still feel no pain, but his training meant that his actions in the next few seconds would ultimately save his life. He tore off the pouch sewn to the inside of his uniform jacket, ripped it open and applied the contents to his wound before making his way back to the Regimental Aid Post. Tommy Atkins was lucky, not merely because the bullet had not killed him. He was lucky because this was 1916 and not 1914 and therefore the nature of his First Field Dressing meant that he had a good chance of staying alive rather than subsequently dying of sepsis caused by infection of his wound.

Death as a result of even relatively minor injuries due to sepsis and gas gangrene had been a major problem in late 1914 and throughout 1915 because the appalling conditions in the trenches meant that wounds were generally accompanied by fragments of dirty clothing and the bodily filth liberally and literally plastered about trench and dug-out. In 1915, however, Lt. Col. Charles Cathcart of the Royal Army Medical Corps and a Senior Surgeon at the Royal Edinburgh Infirmary, recalled that in ancient times even quite terrible wounds had been successfully dressed on the battlefield using Sphagnum bog moss. He investigated further and, on the basis of some successful trials, instigated a nationwide programme of bog-moss collection to create what would become the standard First Field Dressing issued to all UK and Imperial land forces as an integral part of their uniform. People gathered the humble bog moss across the country, from Bodmin Moor to the far north of Shetland. In Shetland, indeed, they held a ‘Shetland Sphagnum Moss Day’ on 17th August 1917 when all schools were closed and folk from across Shetland were encouraged to go out and gather the precious moss. This was to be the first of many such days held in Shetland during the remaining period of the war.

It was established that the First Field Dressing provided a number of improvements over the cotton-based dressings of the early period of the war. Sphagnum could absorb more than twice as much blood and other fluid as cotton wool and thus helped to dry out a wound so that it could heal. It was also fibrous like cotton wool and thus helped to seal the wound, but unlike cotton wool it also appeared to prevent infection of the wound in some mysterious way. Consequently Private Tommy Atkins would survive the war, albeit with a left arm which never worked entirely as it had before his injury, but at least it had not been amputated as the first stage of a slow, grisly death from gas gangrene. His First Field Dressing had somewhat miraculously prevented any infection from setting in and the astonishing efficiency of the RAMC had then ensured that 36 hours later he was back in England with his shoulder being ministered to by a team of highly-trained medical staff in a hospital south of London.

Sphagnum bog moss is a plant no larger than one’s thumb, but what it lacks in stature it makes up for in numbers. It never grows alone but rather occurs en-mass, rather like gazing down on the canopy of a rainforest from an aeroplane. It is a wetland plant, adapted both to being waterlogged and to storing water – vast quantities of it – which is the key to its absorbancy. If we look at the end of a side-branch, we see a number of leaves. Looking closely we also see that each leaf resembles, to a remarkable degree, that much-loved material bubble wrap. Except that bubble wrap cannot store water because the bubbles are sealed; once popped, all the fun goes out of bubble wrap. In the case of Sphagnum bog moss, however, the ‘bubbles’ are large storage cells with a number of open pores. The difficulty with such a system is that when water enters the pores the cells can expand but when water leaves the cells the whole structure simply collapses and it becomes almost impossible then to re-fill these cells – not good news for the Sphagnum plant – or for Private Tommy Atkins and the dried Sphagnum in his First Field Dressing. Fortunately for him, however, these ‘hyaline cells’ of Sphagnum have a cunning trick, in the form of spiral thickening which goes round and round the cell wall. Consequently when water exits the cell in dry conditions the cell remains a large open structure just waiting to suck in any moisture within the general vicinity. In this way it could keep the wound of Private Tommy Atkins dry and, in its natural peat bog habitat, maintain waterlogged conditions to the benefit of all its surrounding fellow Sphagnum plants.

One other consequence of the huge size of the hyaline storage cells is that the living green photosynthetic cells of Sphagnum are tiny, squeezed into narrow strips between the relatively vast hyaline cells. Consequently there is little living tissue in the plant itself to nourish putrefying micro-organisms. This combination of waterlogging and resulting lack of oxygen, combined with the lack of available nutrients, also means that decomposer micro-organisms are unable to keep pace with the steady, if slow, growth of a Sphagnum carpet. The partially-decayed remains of the Sphagnum bog moss therefore accumulate, perhaps only at 1 mm per year, but over a period of 10,000 years this can lead to an accumulation of Sphagnum and other plant remains which may be 10 metres deep. This waterlogged accumulation of plant material is what we know as ‘peat’. Moreover, we now know that Sphagnum has one more trick to ensure such accumulation – a trick which explains the mysterious healing power of the moss.

As well as depriving decomposer micro-organisms from an adequate supply of living material on which to survive, Sphagnum further starves them by exuding a chemical called ‘sphagnan’ which prevents decomposer micro-organisms from taking up nitrogen. It actively starves them. This explains why Private Tommy Atkins was able to reach the medical ministrations of a hospital back in England without any sign of sepsis or the even more feared gas gangrene having appeared. The sphagnan in his First Field Dressing had immobilized the putrefying micro-organisms.

It is no great step to go from the blood and mayhem of World War 1 to the blood and mayhem of the Vikings, but it seems that the Vikings also knew a thing or two about Sphagnum. They are reputed to have wrapped fresh salmon in Sphagnum before setting off on long voyages – a fact which has recently caught the interest of the modern food industry. Having no recipe for how the Vikings did this I thought that it would nevertheless be interesting to prepare a Viking feast for the launch of the Moors for the Future Community Science Big Moss Map Project. Having bought two bags of fresh Sphagnum from The Range, and a fresh salmon steak from Waitrose (on the assumption that this would be pretty fresh), I then cut the steak in two, slit open the two bags of Sphagnum and placed half the steak in each, wrapped both steaks tightly round with Sphagnum before sealing the bags with good old duct tape and cling-film. I then left both in the garage for a month – during a relatively sunny warm spell…

On the day before I was due to go to the Moors for the Future I opened up one bag – to see whether I had a full-scale disaster on my hands. The results were – remarkable! I took the second bag on a hot train from Colchester to Hathersage in the Peak District for the Moors for the Future Launch. At the end of my talk I offered to open the second bag (outside the hall!) for anyone who was interested – as I had no idea what we would find. Would there be a green stinking salmon soup? The result (video thanks to Debra Wilson and Joe Margetts of Moors for the Future):

The sub-title of this piece is ‘- from WW1 to the Climate War’, so where does climate come into this? How is Sphagnum going to help us in the war on climate change? Well, it all comes back to the remarkable preservative powers of Sphagnum, as a result of which the peatlands of the world store more carbon than all the world’s vegetation combined, including the vegetation of rainforests. Many areas of rainforest, including the home of the orangutan, are first and foremost peatlands which happen to be dominated by trees rather than low-growing vegetation. The orangutan is, in effect, a peatland species, despite his nickname ‘Old Man of the Forest’. Indeed this precisely highlights the problem – the world’s peatlands are invisible – and because they are invisible we have damaged them and continue to damage them in countless ways, releasing in only decades or even just a few years the carbon which they have accumulated over millennia. Yet in terms of our opportunities to influence what happens to our global climate in the years to come, Achim Steiner, UN Under-Secretary General and Executive Director, UN Environment Programme (UNEP) has this to say:

“Restoring peatlands is a ‘low hanging fruit’, and among the most cost-effective options for mitigating climate change.”

So, the 80% of our peatlands in the UK which are damaged to the point where they no longer support peat-forming vegetation, and in particular lack a Sphagnum cover, offer an enormous opportunity to prevent further carbon losses by re-establishing a peat-forming vegetation, and then to begin slowly accumulating carbon into new peatland carbon stores. Private Tommy Atkins was saved by a small pack of dried Sphagnum. Perhaps we can all be saved by the source of that Sphagnum, if we now bend our efforts to restoring peat-forming vegetation across the UK’s, and indeed the world’s, peatland ecosystems.