The Smart Forests Atlas is a living archive and virtual field site exploring how digital technologies are transforming forests. It provides tools for researchers and other stakeholders to explore, analyse and reflect upon smart forest knowledges and technologies. The Atlas is designed to allow for multiple entrypoints into the research content. Visitors are encouraged to wander through the site according to their own interests, guided by the four wayfinding devices (Map, Radio, Stories and Logbooks).

Alex and I had the pleasure of going to Cambridge to launch the Smart Forests Atlas at The Forest Multiple in October. We’ve been working on the Smart Forests Atlas for a good part of last year, so it was great to publicly launch it.

October is mushroom season! Last Saturday was particularly bright and sunny after a few days of rain, which is perfect for mushrooms. We went to Hampstead Heath with a few friends who forage mushrooms regularly.

We were lucky and found so many different varieties including honey fungus, black-staining polypores, laughing gym, curry-scented milkcap, fruity brittlegill, porcelain fungus, shaggy scalycap and the iconic fly agaric. Most of these were either inedible or poisonous, so we left them alone after identifying them. Some, like the honey fungus, are edible but we didn’t pick them because we found so many other “choice” mushrooms.

The tastiest find of the day was this hen of the woods. We also found some charcoal burners, parasols, cauliflower fungus and red cracked bolete, which we cooked and ate the next day (after extensive rounds of verification and double-checking.)

I enjoy the process of finding mushrooms in itself, even if we didn’t eat them afterwards. It’s all about paying careful attention. It requires a different way of looking: soft, out of the corners of your eyes. There are certain trees, like beech and oak, where they’re more likely to grow around. Once you learn how to see them, it’s like unlocking a hidden visual layer on the world. Suddenly, there are mushrooms everywhere.

To identify the species, you need to pay even closer attention, examining the mushroom’s structure, shape, texture, gills and smell. I’m following Emergence Magazine’s Writing From the Roots course at the moment and identifying mushrooms reminds me of some of the writing exercises we’ve done: gradually zooming in on something and describing it in closer and closer detail each time.

It takes loads of practice to safely forage mushrooms and I’m not sure we would have eaten any without the guidance of our friends. They recommended two apps for identifying mushrooms: Picture Mushroom and Shroomify. I’ve heard that Mushrooming with Confidence is a really useful identification guide that only includes mushrooms that aren’t easy to mix up with a poisonous doppelgänger. There are also good videos online by Wild Food UK.

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I’ve had quite stringent settings on my phone for a long time: no badges, barely any notifications, screen time restrictions on social media and downtime in the evening. Despite all this, I still spend around 90–120 minutes on my phone every day. Like most of us, I default to picking up my phone and doom-scrolling every time there is minute or two of empty time.

I had a bit of a forced digital detox while we were in Greece: my roaming data ran out so I had a few weeks where I could only access the internet on wifi. I decided to make the most of it, partially inspired by Four Thousand Weeks, and deleted Twitter and Instagram from my phone. I still reached for my phone in every spare moment but it was a lot more boring.

I decided that I should start using RSS again to keep up with blogs and people and news instead. I’m using Feedly as an RSS reader and Pocket to save articles to read later. My Pocket articles go directly to my Kobo, which I love, but unfortunately it doesn’t let me highlight the text. I’ve also moved a lot of my Substacks to RSS now in an attempt to have less in my inbox as well. It seems like it’s not possible to do this with Tiny Letter though.

Here’s a few blogs and newsletters that I really love:

• Harper’s Magazine publishes a Weekly Review that reflects the chaos of our current reality and always makes me laugh out loud.
• The Baffler has a similar dispatch called Fresh Hell.
• Claire L. Evan’s Wild Information. Her most recent post, Intimate Geographies, is sublime.
• Patrick Tanguay’s Sentiers. I think this is the best newsletter out there… I usually save almost every one of the articles he shares to read later.
• Alicia Kennedy writes weekly essays on (vegan) food, politics and culture.
• David O’Reilly writes about digital technology and creative practice. It’s an honest and insightful look at what it means to be creative.
• Gnamma by Lukas W is poetic and watery and so well-written.
• Adam Greenfield writes occasional dispatches about politics and mutual aid.
• Naive Weekly seems sweet and peaceful (via Piper).
• Tom Critchlow’s blog on strategic consultancy
• Dark Matter Lab’s Provocations on strategic design, governance, urbanism and complex systems.
• The White Pube for art criticism, culture and game reviews.
• Branch, an online magazine about using the internet as a positive force for climate justice.
• Climate in Colour, on the intersection of climate science, diversity and sustainable living.
• We Can Fix It, on facing climate change with a mix of fact, feelings and action.

By the way — my own RSS feed is available here.

Four Thousand Weeks – that’s the amount of time you get if you live to 80. Not only does it feel like an impossibly small amount of time, it also speeds up the older you get.

I really enjoyed this book by Oliver Burkeman. It’s less of a self-help book, more of a meditation on time and our relationship to it. It reminded me a bit of another all-time favourite of mine, How To Do Nothing.

Most productivity frameworks are about trying to control your time and squeeze more activity into your finite day. You end up spending all your time “clearing the decks” of urgent but unimportant tasks, and never actually get around to the really important stuff. Day-to-day life becomes an endless to-do list that we have to get through efficiently on the pathway to a point where our real life can begin.

Burkeman suggests there is always going to be too much to do and there will never be enough time. We shouldn’t try to be more productive, but instead embrace our finitude and accept that there’s a whole lot of stuff that we’re just never going to do.

The day will never arrive when you finally have everything under control… The more you confront the facts of finitude instead — and work with them, rather than against them — the more productive, meaningful and joyful life becomes.

This necessarily requires some sacrifice. It’s not just about saying “no” to the things you didn’t really want to do anyway – it’s also about giving up some things that you really want to do.

There are hard choices to be made: which balls to let drop, which people to disappoint, which cherished ambitions to abandon, which roles to fail at.

Instead of clearing the decks, declining to clear the decks, focusing instead on what’s truly of greatest consequence while tolerating the discomfort of knowing that, as you do so, the decks will be filling up further, with emails and errands and or to-dos, many of which you may never get round to at all.

The key is not more productivity but conscious choices and acceptance – the joy of missing out. We have to accept that this is a sacrifice, that we will feel discomfort, that the to do list will always be infinite…

The core challenge of managing our limited time isn’t about how to get everything done but how to decide most wisely what not to do, and how to feel at peace about not doing it.

Personally, I feel like I’m always living in the future: either anxiously worrying about what’s going to happen or excitedly/impatiently imagining various future scenarios in great detail. I really agree with Burkeman’s arguments about letting go of our obsession with the future and paying attention to the current moment, but in practice it’s obviously much harder.

You can’t know that things will turn out all right. The struggle for certainty is an intrinsically hopeless one, which means you have permission to stop engaging in it.

One bit that really resonated with me was the part about time as a “network good”: our time is only valuable when it’s in sync with the people we care about. This necessarily means relinquishing control over our own time, in order to fall into step with others. Digital nomadism (I hate that term) optimises for extreme personal sovereignty over time, at the expense of being connected to others – which is ultimately what makes life meaningful.

To be deeply rooted in a particular community or place, you have to stop moving around. These kinds of meaningful and singular accomplishments just take the time that they take.

The book gets more practical in the appendix, which summarises the main points and suggests some actual things you can do day-to-day, like:

• Much advice of getting things done implicitly promises that it’ll help you get everything important done — but that’s impossible, and struggling to get there will only make you busier. It’s better to begin from the assumption that tough choices are inevitable and to focus on making them consciously and well.
• Establish predetermined time boundaries for your daily work.
• Focus on one big project at a time, and see it to completion before moving on to what’s next. It’s alluring to try to alleviate the anxiety of having too many responsibilities or ambitons by getting stated on them all at once, but you’ll make little progress that way; instead, train yourself to get incrementally better at tolerating the anxiety.
• Strategic underachievement: nominating in advance whole areas of your life in which you won’t expect excellence of yourself.
• Pay more attention to every moment, however mundane: to find novelty not by doing radically different things but by plunging more deeply into the life you already have.
• Not knowing what’s coming next — which is the situation you’re always in, with regards to the future— presents an ideal opportunity for choosing curiosity (wondering what might happen next) over worry (hoping that a specific thing will happen next and fearing it might not) wherever you can.

I recently read Our Shared Storm by Andrew Dana Hudson, a speculative fiction novel based on each of the five climate-modelling scenarios in the latest IPCC report. It’s got me thinking obsessing a little about solarpunk!

Solarpunk is an optimistic vision of the future where we’re in dynamic balance with environmental systems. It’s polyphonic, abundant, collective, anti-capitalist and decolonial. What I like about it is that it’s not just an aesthetic or genre or utopian vision for the future, it’s something you can do and be in the present. In Jay Springett’s words:

Solarpunk as a movement is building new futures in the minds of individuals but also creating and inspiring communities to DIY their own better futures into existence from the bottom up.

Solarpunk fiction

I think most of the science fiction I read these days could be defined as solarpunk. This list of solarpunk canon by Paul Fletcher Hill reads like a list of my favourite books:

• The Earthseed series (Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents) by Octavia Butler
• The Mars trilogy (especially Green Mars) by Kim Stanley Robinson
• The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson
• Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech in China’s Countryside
   by Xiaowei Wang
• The Dispossessed by Ursula K Le Guin
• How to Blow Up a Pipeline by Andreas Malm
• Studio Ghibli’s Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind

(I’d add Station Eleven and Half Earth Socialism as well.)

Solarpunk societies

In Our Greatest Political Novelist, Tim Kreider outlines Kim Stanley Robinson’s usual ingredients for his [solarpunk] utopias:

He scavenges ideas from the American Constitution, the Swiss confederacy, “the guild socialism of Great Britain, Yugoslavian worker management, Mondragon ownership, Kerala land tenure, and so on” to construct his utopias.

Most of these utopias include:

• common stewardship—not ownership—of the land, water, and air
• an economic system based on ecological reality
• divesting central governments of most of their power and diffusing it among local communities
• the basics of existence, like health care, removed from the cruelties of the free market
• the application of democratic principles like self-determination and equality in the workplace—which, in practice, means small co-ops instead of vast, hierarchical, exploitative corporations—and,
• a reverence for the natural world codified into law.

While in Berlin earlier this year I saw Adam Greenfield’s lecture at the Weizenbaum Conference. I missed the first bit of it, which apparently was very doomy, but made it for the second half where he talked through his vision for the future, which I would argue is a solarpunk one:

• Local community infrastructure, made/adapted/reused from available materials
• Short supply chains
• Independence from the grid
• Lightweight, convivial technologies
• Local knowledge of how to build and maintain systems
• An ethos of maintenance, repair and mutual care

Solarpunk now!

A few places I’ve visited this year that have tangibly felt solarpunk:

The Future Food System house in Melbourne

A self sustaining, zero waste, productive house that demonstrates the potential of our homes to provide shelter, produce food and generate energy.

The Floating University in Berlin

A series of DIY structures floating in a rainwater retention basin next to the former Tempelhof airfield.

An inner city laboratory for collective, experimental learning, knowledge transfer and the formation of trans-disciplinary networks to challenge routines and habits of urban practices.

documenta 15

This year’s documenta was directed by a collective from Indonesia called ruangrupa and centred around the values of lumbung.

lumbung, which directly translates as “rice barn”, refers to a communal building in rural Indonesia where a community’s harvest is gathered, stored and distributed according to jointly determined criteria as a pooled resource for the future.

The lumbung practice enables an alternative economy of collectivity, shared resource building, and equitable distribution. lumbung is anchored in the local and based on values such as humor, generosity, independence, transparency, sufficiency, and regeneration.

Further reading

• Anthem of the Sun by Olivia Rosane
• Is Ornamenting Solar Panels a Crime? by Elvia Wilk
• On Solarpunk by Paul Fletcher-Hill
• Life in the Future Beyond the Rusted Chrome of Yestermorrow by Jay Springett

We were in Athens last week, so naturally we visited the Acropolis. What surprised me was that the pathway to the Acropolis is a masterpiece in its own right. (Thanks to my dad for sharing this.)

Designed in the mid-50s by Dimitris Pikionis, it’s a collage of historical references, regionalism and modernism. They build it with reclaimed stones from demolished buildings nearby, celebrating their imperfections and making a direction connection to the local history.

Throughout the path, there are bold, gestural forms made from concrete, inspired by the artwork of Paul Klee. By choosing a modernist material like concrete, Pikionis created a dialogue with the International Style of architecture that was spreading throughout Athens at the time.

What I loved most was that he worked with local craftsmen and let the design emerge from the bottom up:

Pikionis enlisted a crew of skilled local Greek artisans and craftsmen to work the stones and materials. At the outset of the construction, Pikionis eschewed typical dogmatic plans and chose to set the tone for the design through few drawings. He encouraged the local workers to the find the path within the landscape and imbue the materials with their own particular spirit and design through shapes, textures, and patterns. Pikionis was employing the traditional method of the master builder, constructing the site through the hands of the craftsmen and generating a pluralistic design.

Lisbon

My wonderful friend Linsey made us a guide to Lisbon, filled with natural wine spots and local, seasonal food. Particular favourites were Senhor Uva and Comida Independente. We also stumbled on Bar Boca one night, a tiny natural wine bar in Alfama that does vegan tapas.

One of the highlights was the Atelier-Museu Júlio Pomar. I love his work, so colourful and joyful. The exhibition we saw was all about how he explored narrative and classic mythology in his work.

I’ve been really enjoying Panda Bear and Sonic Boom’s new album Reset. When we were in Lisbon I discovered that Panda Bear has been living there since 2004!

Water and its memory

At the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, I was pleasantly surprised by a map of the Brisbane River at the beginning of their Reclaim the Earth exhibition. It was part of a series of works by Judy Watson, an Indigenous Australian artist.

The works all centred around water and its memory, responding to both the history of the Seine and in Queensland. She sources artificial and organic materials to make natural dyes, then lets the pieces evolve in open air and on the ground.

Her creative process leaves room for the accidental and the random, and for the effects of time, environment, and natural material on her work in a context of deep climate change. The artist’s method evolves by working from site and memory, revealing Indigenous histories, following lines of emotional and physical topography.

Practicing

In Rotterdam, I visited my friend Ben at Extra Practice, a studio space he shares with four of his friends. It’s a wonderful converted shopfront on a corner, glass windows open to the world. Same energy as Evening Class, except it’s amazing how much further you can take it if you do it outside of London.

While I was there, we did a show for their radio station Good Times Bad Times. It was a lot of fun! They’ve just started a new “season” centred on refusal, which linked in really nicely with some of the themes I’ve been thinking about too.

We also visited Varia during their open hours. We were just planning to drop by briefly but ended up staying for many hours – they even cooked us lunch. Really enjoyed hearing about their projects, how they got started, what they’ve been thinking about.

Nightjet

So excited to see the new Nightjet trains from OBB. They look so cozy! I would be happy to never set foot on a plane again if I could just travel around on one of these.

Nature?

Love this quote from a recent Kim Stanley Robinson interview:

Nature and natural are words with particular weights that are perhaps not relevant now. We are part of a biosphere that sustains us. Half the DNA in your body is not human DNA, you are a biome like a swamp, with a particular balance or ecology that is hard to keep going – and indeed it will only go for a while after which it falls apart and you die. The world is your body, you breathe it, drink it, eat it, it lives inside you, and you only live and think because this community is doing well. So: nature? You are nature, nature is you. Natural is what happens. The word is useless as a divide, there is no Human apart from Nature, you have no thoughts or feelings without your body, and the Earth is your body, so please dispense with that dichotomy of human/nature, and attend to your own health, which is to say your biosphere’s health.

Walkaway

I just read Walkaway by Cory Doctorow and really liked it. It felt clunky in parts (often this kind of idealistic sci-fi does) but I enjoyed a lot of the themes: post-scarcity, anarchism, refusal of bullshit jobs, open source everything, mutual aid.

He wrote a short article in Wired about it: Disaster Doesn’t Have to End in Dystopia.

One of the phrases that has been rattling around in my head after reading it is “slicing time thick”:

Even after years of walkaway, she was used to slicing time into rice-paper slices thin enough for one discrete thing, before moving onto the next. Most of the time, she rushed to complete this current moment before the next thumped the door. Every adult she’d known matched that rhythm, the next thing almost upon them, the current one had best be taken care of in haste. Etcetera sliced his time thick.

It’s something I’ve been trying to focus on over the last few weeks. I’m thankfully on holidays now, but in the lead up to my break I was feeling so burnt out and overwhelmed. The more exhausted I got, the more I would scramble around rushing through tasks and not doing a good job of anything.

I’m trying to focus on moving very slowly, not planning too much, not expecting too much of myself. Easier to do on holidays, of course, but I want to find ways to bring this slowness with me once I go back to work.

I learn more with each weaving I make.

This one is particular favourite of mine, made last month for H’s mum. It’s inspired by the colours and textures of the Welsh landscape: green hills, purple and red heather, mountains, lichen. I bought some roving from a local shop in Dolgellau – it’s incredibly soft, hand-dyed in purple, green and yellow. I also found some wool on our hike and added that in as clouds.

History is full of people who just didn’t. They said no thank you, turned away, ran away to the desert, stood on the streets in rags, lived in barrels, burned down their own houses, walked barefoot through town, killed their rapists, pushed away dinner, meditated into the light. Even babies refuse, and the elderly, too. All types of animals refuse: at the zoo they gaze dead-eyed through plexiglass, fling feces at the human faces, stop having babies. Classes refuse. The poor throw their lives onto barricades. Workers slow the line. Enslaved people have always refused, poisoning the feasts, aborting the embryos. And the diligent, flamboyant jaywalkers assert themselves against traffic as the first and foremost visible, daily lesson in just not.
— No by Anne Boyer

Strike!

It’s a hot strike summer in the UK. Last week’s edition of The Week in Work was the longest ever. Transport workers, postal workers, barristers, lawyers, gravediggers, journalists – all on strike. Withdrawing our labour is the most powerful way for workers to say NO to exploitation.

Don’t!

Meanwhile, the energy crisis keeps getting worse. Now they’re predicting that energy bills will pass £5000 in January, while energy companies are reporting record profits. Two movements based on mass refusal have emerged in response – Don’t Pay and Enough is Enough.

The theory of change for Don’t Pay takes its inspiration from the Poll Tax protests in early 1990. They’re aiming to get a million people to pledge that they won’t pay their energy bills on 1 October, then use this bargaining power to get the government to intervene and reduce the bills to an affordable level.

Enough is Enough is led by MPs like Zarah Sultana and trade unionists like Mick Lynch. They’re planning to hold rallies, support picket lines and form community groups to deal with the crisis.

No!

No, the 2012 film by Pablo Larrain, is based on the story of the plebescite in Chile that ended 15 years of Pinochet’s authoritarian rule. In it, an advertising professional and many other creatives support the campaign by creating joyful propaganda focused on how liberating and positive it would be to vote NO.

Smash!

The Luddites were early nineteenth-century weavers who smashed the machines that were ruining their working conditions. Luddism is not about being scared of new technology (in the sense that the term is used today), it’s about being critical of any progress that makes life worse for people.

Though the Luddites are often only glibly referenced in modern debates, the truth is that they were directly concerned with conditions of labour, rather than mindless machine-breaking or some reactionary desire to turn back time. They sought to redefine their relationship with technology in a way that resisted dehumanisation.
— Lizzie O’Shea, Future Histories

Degrow!

Luddism might also link with the politics of degrowth, a movement that originated in the Global South and shares with Luddism an acknowledgement that liberation is not tied up with the endless accumulation of capital, and further, that well-being cannot be reduced to economic statistics.
— Gavin Mueller, Decelerate Now!

In Degrowth: No, let’s not call it something else, the authors argue again a common criticism of degrowth: that it’s too negative. That’s the point! Unlike net zero or green capitalism, degrowth doesn’t pretend that we can continue our current way of life with a few added solar panels.

It’s not going to be easy, but we must rapidly downscale our consumption in order to wrench ourselves away from our current trajectory. The potential, however, is that in leaping from this runaway train of constant growth and exploitation, we land somewhere much more abundant.

As adrienne maree brown says in Pleasure Activism:

Your no makes way for your yes.