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Ingrid Finch's avatar

As a wannabe druid myself, I find great comfort in the presence of ancient trees. The UK is very competent indeed at trashing everything natural, wholesome and good for the spirit.

Bring back scary forests where myths and legends abound, filled with a myriad of different creatures, seen and unseen.

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Luke Dodson's avatar

Despite our regrettably denuded landscape, one thing that our island apparently possesses in relative abundance is formidably ancient trees.

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Moe Dodson's avatar

Perhaps the greatest 'Peasant Poet' in the English language is John Clare, who was in fact a landless agricultural labourer. He wasn't just a 'poet' but he wrote beer-ballads for the pub next door to his cottage, and was great drinker and boon companion himself. But when the landlords cut down an ancient tree near his cottage, he nearly had a nervous breakdown.

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The Mighty Humanzee's avatar

There is unrest in the forest

There is trouble with the trees

For the Maples want more sunlight

And the Oaks ignore their pleas

At the end of the song, with great irony

The trees are all kept equal

By hatchet

Axe

And saw

In my state of Michigan our illustrious betters have concluded they need 215,000 acres to be cleared for the Green New Deal windmills. With great irony we will lose ecosystem, because the spreadsheet peeps and technocrat rockstars are so disconnected from Nature they believe their models and other abstractions will save Nature. It’s frightening.

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Bruce L. Nelson's avatar

In the US, we have 50 states in some stage of actual deforestation while at the same time subcoming to environmentally planned global "forestation." It is a metaphor for how education declutters our minds of Truth so that it can implant globalist initiatives.

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Steve Wellings's avatar

Brilliant piece, Luke.

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Sean Valdrow's avatar

I live in Alaska.

The English royally fucked up killing of the bear, the wolf, the salmon that once ran in the Thames river. I seen that same imperative at work in Alaska today and it sickens my soul.

There are few things better than talking to a moose in your yard or seeing a lynx sneaking off in the dark or looking a wild wolf in the eyes and acknowledging each other.

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the long warred's avatar

Wild boar 🐗 die real hard, hunted them in Florida.

Very tasty!

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Zippy the Pinhead's avatar

Speaking of trees please check out a Unique Understanding of their association with human beings:

http://www.dabase.org/trees.htm

Two related sites

http://www.fnmzoo.org/wisdom-teaching

http://fearnomore.vision/human/what-man-represents

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Jo Henderson's avatar

Great article. When I moved down from Scotland to England in my early teens I remember the sense I had of Southern England being like a garden, hyper domesticated, denatured as an indoor cat. I was disturbed by it for years, until eventually I got used to it. Arguably, the Scottish have retained a deeper sense of national identity because of the relationship with the untamed (and in places untameable) land. It's not about victories and economics, but about place.

The way I'm still able to love the UK is to detach it completely from the temporary political shambles that speaks in its name, and only think about the land, the island of Britain and mountains, rivers, streams, coves and beaches, as well as any people who are still connected to place.

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Cliff's avatar

"Imagine how many fractions of a GDP point we could gain by PUTTING A ROAD through it?"

For some reason, I'm imagining the black-robed Guild steersmen from David Lynch's Dune chanting "Line Go Up" in their machine language.

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Luke Dodson's avatar

99% of the field of economics is basically a cargo-cult at this point.

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Jack Trent's avatar

Oops. I read this Substack post a few days ago and did not remember the details at the start nor Bidwell's name. Now I get it. I can go back and review!

Substack? Twitter/X? you guys know each other?

I am being tested maybe! Do I buy Mr. Bidwell's story when I am not misguided by Mr. Dodson? I somehow find some social media encounters kinda amusing. If you don't laugh, or at least smile once in a while or you go crazy.

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Jack Trent's avatar

I look at Twitter/X maybe once a year. I do not know how they decide what to show me—that's not important right now. I left X up on my screen and this morning saw this: https://x.com/sam_bidwell/status/1849875712968159362

I honestly expected the last photo to have a caption like "And where have our souls gone, without the bears, wolves, and grand oaks." Instead you get something quite different.

I moved from the Pacific NW, USA to France 10 years ago and both my grandmothers were English/Irish, so the Twitter photos and maps were quite interesting. Then, with the last caption, I felt like someone poured a bucket of manure on my head.

Can anyone explain this? I don't know if it is satire or not, a common problem these days.

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Kimberly Steele's avatar

Thank you for this -- it was an education and fodder for a great deal of meditation. Plant nerd question... what is the plant in the foreground of the mossy tree picture?

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Luke Dodson's avatar

Thanks, Kimberley! You know, that's a very good question to which my botanical knowledge is insufficient to answer. Some kind of lichen would be my uneducated guess. The photo actually came from Bidwell's thread, as an example of how staggeringly dissociated the man must be that he is clearly unable to see the beauty in such a landscape.

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Kimberly Steele's avatar

That is a classic symptom of our era — total blindness, numbness, and insensitivity to the etheric plane. He’s starving to death on the etheric and he doesn’t even know it. It’s like being a leper and having your nose and other extremities rot off without understanding you’ve got leprosy or even that you are diseased.

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Luke Dodson's avatar

Poor dude. May he be blessed, if he's open to it.

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Phil Holmes Music's avatar

Even the forests and fields are being replaced with phone masts and solar arrays. The old windmills replaced with millions of wind turbines. Cyberspace encroaching. Consuming the old earth and making it tech. Are we just part of Metal Micky's dream?

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Psymask's avatar

Hear hear dear boy. The mycelial network needs to grow in order for the trees to get back to good health. I think the diseases is linked to that reduction and the shit dumped from above.

The trees are of course fighting back and will ultimately win. We can do our best where we can to assist.

Love this article. Check out my most recent post, kind sync with this.

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Mr. Raven's avatar

Fantastic piece, thanks so much.

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Moe Dodson's avatar

Never saw this side of GM Hopkins - bloody heel, how badly educated I was!

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