Radical Kinship

Anne Cross

Another talk on regeneration, they are all around us in East Sussex. Rewilding is definitely a thing. Sometimes one suspects a touch of nimbyism. Reclaim the land for nature….keep the developers out. This one felt different; it was rooted in the soil. The starting point a composting project, turning the communities’ food waste into rich compost for the ongoing cycle of food growing, the regeneration of depleted soil.
These who tell this particular story of regeneration have lived on their 30 acres of land for many years. Having moved from South London with a small inheritance, they were looking for a different way of life. Out of the diversity & complexity of city life for a chance to grow with nature, at a slower kind of pace. A small holding with a couple of fair size lakes, fishing became their main source of income as they tended their plot. Known for miles around they grew a community of locals and wider who brought their rods and sat a while.
Until it all changed, slowly at first, then all the fish were floating on the surface.
Investigation of the movements in the wider ecology revealed a new neighbour up the hill with different plans for the opportunity of quiet rural spaces. The free dumping of waste from his building company. Cheaper you see; cheaper to buy land, use it as a dump, then cover it over and sell. This is not an isolated incident. Just ask the environment agency – as impotent as all the land they fail to protect.
Along with investigation and hopefully litigation comes determination that this is not the end of the story for this land. Inspiration, participation, collaboration and restoration. One bucket of food waste at a time.
A single drop of blood in an Olympic swimming pool will attract a shark. When rains fall on dry soil the earthy scent can be detected by humans in concentrations as low as anywhere from 0.4 parts per billion to 5 parts per trillion. Rub this healthy soil between your fingers, feel it, smell it, roll in it. In a teaspoonful we can count the bacteria in the billions, the mycelium in the tens of kilometres, the protozoa in the thousands and the nematodes in the scores.
A picture emerged from this storyteller of regeneration – a vision of the future, a land held in trust by many families, food grown and carried to the table, baskets woven, a creche for the babes, a creche for the elderly! Someway off I’m sure, but for my last years I have the simple hope of a rocking chair and the company of young children eager for a story and a warm lap to curl into….
….I will tell stories of how our universe came into existence 13.8 billion years ago, born as the first moment of an ongoing big breath, evolving from simplicity to ever growing complexity, diversity, self-awareness.
Protons to atoms to cells to planets to plants to animals to humans. Everything ever created integrally connected, part of the whole of Gaia’s own evolutionary progress and purpose.
I will tell of times when we forgot we are part of an integrally connected whole. When we were excited by our plot and thought with Robert Frost’s acquaintances’…. ‘good fences make good neighbours’.
I will tell the story of the hare and the tortoise, of those who raced to the top through wealth & privilege, and those who started in the soil, one bucket of food waste at a time. Of quick fix and slow compost-ition.
I will give thanks for the rewilders, the regenerators, the composters.
The story will forever be unfinished, building, one breath, one life, one generation at a time. It will only be in ages to come that our descendants might look back and sigh. We made it. Or we didn’t.
And of the developers I will tell a story. Brick dust composts slowly.

Anne Cross is a writer, storyteller and local councillor. With a deep bow to all things fungus she weaves her mycelial stories through life, love and longing for a world fit for her grandchildren and seven times great grandchildren.