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sculpture park, photos and videos with tips on how to garden in an environmentally-conscious method, with our rewilding techniques, and so much more. The greater you contribute to DSP Online on a monthly basis, the more you will get back - online chats and livestreams with founder and environmentalist Philip Letts, priority bookings and discounts on tours, workshops and visits in-park; the list of perks is constantly growing and developing. At the sculpture park’s planned reopening in July, numbers will be greatly constricted as we remain wary of the current Covid-19 pandemic. In lieu of this, DSP Online has never been of greater use. Join DSP Online and receive a 10% discount on all activities in-park. The app is not purely beneficial in the digital sphere, but also for those coming to the park, enjoying a greater number of activities at an even lower price. Join DSP Online, and become a valued partner of Devon Sculpture Park - both online and in-park. l Visit www.devonsculpturepark.org to find out more about joining DSP Online, and other details about affordable membership packages so you can get involved with Devon Sculpture Park.
Chocolate Pekins - sweet temperaments. Middle left: Silver Partridge Pekins en-friendly. Bottom left: Blue Orpington Bantams - pretty and productive. Right: Buff in cockerel - the gentle giant. Inset: Muscovey ducks - quiet and good layers.
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Foxes bold as love ROB HOPKINS founder of the Transition Network and Transition Town Totnes believes we have the perfect opportunity to bounce forward after what has been ‘the Spring of our lives’.
I met a friend in the street the other day, and we chatted, whilst maintaining our obligatory 2 metres distance. It is amazing how quickly this has become normal. For decades the idea of Totnes without hugs would have been utterly unimaginable, and yet there we were. He is someone who gets up earlier in the morning than I usually do, and he told me of encounters with deer in the street, foxes bold as brass strolling down morning streets, blue tits landing on his shoulder whilst sitting in the garden. It resonated with to stories from elsewhere, of herds of wild goats roaming town centres and dolphins popping up in the canals of Venice for the first time in living memory. Another friend who lives on the High Street told me of finding an owl on her windowsill for the first time ever. As I write this, a pair of bullfinches are sitting outside my window. I feel as though I am being visited by royalty. I have lived through a Spring that, as Charles Dickens would have put it, “was the best of times [and] … the worst of times”. It has, in many ways, been the most glorious Spring of my life. Dazzling sunshine, grass and leaves greener than I can ever remember, birdsong louder than I’ve ever experienced, sunrises and sunsets that took the breath away, a sky free from contrails, streets free of cars, air fresher and more delicious than I ever recall. Vegetable gardens popping up everywhere. Seed companies overwhelmed with orders. Local food producers tripling, quadrupling production in order to keep up with demand. In many ways, this has been the Spring of our lives. And yet at what cost? We have arrived here through the absolutely worst route. No-one would have chosen this as the way to arrive here, and it is almost certain that by the time you read this, business-as-usual will have clawed back most of the gains set out above. But what these weeks of lockdown have done is to give us a taste of what a more localised, more resilient future would actually be like. Hold on to that. Emblazon it in your memory. Remember what it felt like, smelt like, sounded like. Two weeks into the lockdown I took part in a ‘Teach-In’ with novelist and activist Arundhati Roy. She talked about how COVID-19 has been like an MRI scan for each nation it has visited, highlighting the inequalities and injustices in each. In the UK we have seen that BAME people have been 4 times more likely to be killed by this virus, and that air pollution, suffered predominantly by those in the poorest urban areas, has been a key factor in exacerbating vulnerability to it. The government was happy to send poorer workers Linocuts by Rob who back to work in unsafe conditions whilst the is passing the time in middle classes continued working from home, lockdown by doing and while state schools re-opened, private something artistic schools remained firmly shut. every day. This has, of course, been ruinous to the economy, and Totnes is not exempt from that. Many small businesses will not survive and many families have suffered huge financial hardship. I fear for the damage this will do to Totnes High Street, with its 80% of businesses being independent, familyowned enterprises. Some people of course have done well out of this crisis but not many. A French friend once told me a saying used there to describe how some people do well out of even the worst of crises: “we have a saying, that the sinking of the Titanic turned out very well for the lobsters in the kitchen”. Jeff Bezos may well also be thinking that this is the best Spring of his life, but for very different reasons. What matters now is that we do everything we can to ensure that we do not go back to how things were before, that we ‘bounce forward’ rather than ‘bounce back’. It is entirely possible that we move from a growth economy to a wellbeing economy, one whose main purpose is the cultivation of those very things we have cherished over these months, the clean air, the sense of shared purpose, the biodiverse towns and streets, the birdsong. In Totnes we already have many pieces of the puzzle. What matters going forward, and with urgency, is that we more skilfully work together, forge partnerships and connections, raise our level of ambition. We need to build on this going forward, use it as the launch pad that enables us to leap to new heights, rather than just slumping back into a business-as-usual that, in reality, actually worked well for very few people. Build back better. l Rob has just launched a podcast series, ‘From What If to What Next’. Subscribe a www.patreon.com/fromwhatiftowhatnext . His latest book, ‘From What Is to What If: unleashing the power of imagination to create the future we want’, is now out now. Follow his blog at www.robhopkins.net
Editorial: 01392 346342 editor@reconnectonline.co.uk
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