Last week I was at Schumacher Collage for a short course led by Dougald Hine and Paul Kingsnorth of Dark Mountain. This quick blog is simply to pull some links together for ease of reference later.
Deep Time Walk
I joined others on a Deep Time walk, as described below:
In this time of ecological crisis, we need practical, experiential ways of reconnecting with our Earth as a great living being so that we can begin to treat our planet with the deep respect she deserves. At Schumacher College, Stephan Harding has shared his Deep Time Walk with hundreds of people from all over the world. It never fails to propel people into a deeply felt, bodily experience of the immense age of our Earth and of the severity and recentness of our impact.
The Walk takes place over 4.6 kilometres, representing 4,600 million years: the age of the Earth. On this scale, each meter represents a million years, and each millimetre one thousand years. Each footstep is about half a million years.
During the walk, people stop at key moments along this time line so that Stephan can briefly share important events in Earth's history: among them the creation of the Moon, the appearance of life, the Snowball Earths, the first multicellular life, and finally, after hours of walking, in the last 1/5th of a millimetre, the industrial revolution and with it the beginning of climate change and the sixth mass extinction
YouTube links
I walked the same route as is shown in these (February) Youtube clips, but on a glorious summer day - Deep Time Walk Stephan Harding No 1 - www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayM103FToRA No 2 - www.youtube.com/watch?v=-asy7kUqn7o and finally https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYqgjWMCh_c the tiny bit at the end of the walk representing the arrival of people and when we start to mess things up.
See also Dr. Stephan Harding - Gaia Theory & Deep Ecology - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=523bXlK5t34 All of this is worth watching, but I want to remind myself that around 58 minutes through is a bit that encourages me in my small contribution towards action, through helping people from different cultures, and from different disciplines, and from different ways of thinking and doing to connect, communicate and collaborate. Also to remember - around 1 hour 15mins - science and scientific method and bringing in a blending of qualitative and quantitative approaches. I don't want to lose what I learned last week on the walk and with Dark Mountain (The Dark Mountain Project )
The youtube link above covers all ten talks. There are shorter youtubes covering just some of the ten talks, and those might be easier to dip in and out of.