Events at the Festival

 I'm sorry to have missed Dame Judi Dench reciting Shakespeare, or Miriam Margolyes, or so many other events over the last week (not to mention the Alt Hay events in the Parish Hall - I just didn't have the energy to go out in the evenings!)

But I did manage to see two very good events.  The first was Maggie Aderin-Pocock talking about her new book about looking at constellations, with a bit about her work around the world at big telescopes, and a bit about her childhood running up to the top of her block of flats to look at the moon.  I loved the way she described watching the Clangers as being a 'gateway drug' to Star Trek - and now she's appeared, in puppet form, in the modern re-make of the Clangers, and she got to visit the set and hold the soup dragon in her hands!

The other event was Robin Wall Kimmerer, talking about her book Braiding Sweetgrass, her new book Gathering Moss, and her upcoming book Service Berry.  She was in conversation with James Rebanks - and now I'll have to look out for his books, too.  He has a sheep farm where he practices regenerative agriculture - they talked a bit about listening to the plants on the land, and the plants will tell you what they need to thrive. 

One of the examples was a field of grass that was being overgrown with thistles.  Normal farming practice is to poison the thistles, or cut them, but they only grow in large numbers where the grass has been nibbled down to nothing and has a weak root system - encourage the grass (stop over grazing) and encourage biodiversity with wild flowers and different grass species, and the thistles won't get such a hold on the field to begin with.

If they wanted to send the audience away with one thought - and it was a sold out event in the Global Stage, which is one of the biggest stages - it was probably "Photosynthesis is the answer".  It may be a boring thing that you learn at school and then forget about, but it is vital to life on Earth.

Robin Wall Kimmerer is an enrolled member of the Potawatomi tribe, and she talked about their Creation myth, in which Skywoman falls to Earth, which was covered with water, where the animals that lived in the water brought earth up for her to live on, and she scattered the seeds of all the good plants from the branch of the tree that she had brought down with her.  It's a story about gift giving and love, in contrast to the story of Adam and Eve where humans have dominion over the animals.  She said that we, as a species, need to get back to that mind set of love and reciprocity with the natural world.  One of her examples was the traditional indigenous Three Sisters planting scheme, where corn provides something for the bean plant to grow up, and squash leaves cover the ground and keep the roots moist - this way of planting provides more food than three separate monocultures.

Modern industrial farming breaks up the process of growing into separate bits, when it would be better if the different processes were integrated - and there are no consequences to the separate actions, which leads to problems further down the line.

There were a couple of interesting questions at the end, too.  One was about the Welsh government policy of putting aside 10% of farmland for nature - James answered this one, by saying that some parts of farms are uneconomic in the current climate, and it is possible to do this with those parts of the farm that are losing money, but he said we also have to look at the bigger picture, where supermarkets have enormous power, and that we need better regulation and a fairer pricing structure to benefit the farmers who are struggling.

Another questioner asked if it wasn't a good thing for there to be more CO2 in the atmosphere, because didn't it make plants grow faster and be greener?  Robin said that CO2 is not the only thing to consider - plants also need nitrogen and phosphorus and other elements, and those things have to be in balance.  CO2 is pumped into some commercial greenhouses to make the plants grow quicker, but this is not necessarily a good thing.

Another thought for the audience to take away with them was how to do practical things to save the planet.  "Sometimes you've got to make a ruckus," Robin said - and sometimes you have to burn something down to get something better in its place.  Also, she said that we are all given a gift, and it's up to us to find out the best way to use that - whether it's picking out what we can do from one of those books with a title like "100 Ways to Save the Planet" or something else - find what you love, and do that.