I write, it’s true. But I mostly do other things, largely of a more practical nature than typing.
One such thing is running a fruit and agroforestry tree nursery (which, like so much else, I do not do alone, but with my marvellous wife).
Every year, around March-time, we will gather together hundreds of fruit tree scions we’ve collected over the winter, many of them rare and heritage varieties from across Wales.
With small, sharp knives in hand and the radio on, we’ll sit under cover outside and “bench graft” these scions onto fruit tree rootstocks, using techniques handed down from generation to generation over centuries; techniques that differ in only the smallest ways since the Romans brought them here.
We’ll plant those out in the tree nursery and we’ll lovingly care for them, feeding them with all manner of home-made concoctions, watching them grow as the sun shines.
Come Summer, we’ll propagate more fruit trees. This time we’ll take just a single bud from a tree that we want to grow, a bud that is perhaps no larger than a ladybird, and we’ll delicately connect it to the living tissue of a rootstock in a technique called bud chipping. The next year, these trees will grow from that one bud to six foot tall in just a few months.
These old practices happen all over Britain through a massive diversity of enterprises. Together they are literally carving out a living keeping the fruit heritage and diversity of Britain alive.
After a few months of growing, the trees lose their leaves and head into dormancy. That means it’s tree-planting season. And so it is that when the nights set in, the West Wales winds start to howl, and all I want to do is light the fire and read, it is then that with a good coat on and a spade in hand, we head out to the trees, dig them up and send them out to be planted in the homes of whoever has bought them.
It can be cold work, but there is something very magical about bringing a tree to life and then sending it out to the world.
Most of the trees we send will live well beyond my lifetime. And over all those many years of their lives, they will produce blossom that feeds all manner of visiting insects, and leaves that feed caterpillars and, when the leaves drop, fungi.
They’ll produce fruit, which lest we forget, is why we plant them in the first place, and we’ll enjoy that for generations, as fresh fruit or, more often than not, in the marvellously processed forms of juice, vinegar or cider.
These trees grow outside of course, in full view of wild passers-by, so that same fruit will be food for blackbirds and badgers and mice and all manner of invertebrates. The tree itself will be a home and shelter through the seasons, for lichens, mosses, squirrels and birds, to name just a few. Meanwhile, the infinite world in our living soils will build up a close and symbiotic relationship with the tree through its roots, growing in population as the tree grows.
And all of that for decades, at least.
That’s worth a cold trip out in the winter.
The apples we eat aren’t domestic to this country, but they feel it. They were here when the Romans were tiling floors and building roads (they brought them over in fact). They were hanging from the trees at the very same time the battle of Hastings took place. They were a favourite on the feasting tables of Henry VIII. Every county had its apple varieties, its apple grafters, its cider producers.
It’s a story that is replicated around the world. Every culture that grows the apple seems to fall in love with it. Just take the largest city in Kazakhstan, from where the domesticated apple originates. It’s called Almaty – translated as “rich with apples.”
There seems to be something about the apple that somehow stirs our hankering for the traditions, rituals and community that are bound up with the living world around us. The apple connects us to place, to history, to the rest of life. And it’s infectious.
No wonder then that it didn’t take much for the annual ‘Apple Day’, on October 21st, to catch on. It has all the feel of the same age-old traditions and rituals, although it was invented by the charity Common Ground in the 1990s.
Like all great and resilient ideas, apple day has grown and diversified organically from that original seeding to a mish-mash of variations across the country. Apples Days are organised by everyone and anyone, in whatever way feels like it works for that group of people.
Yet just tell someone that it’s apple day and they have a sense of what to do.
Dunk, bite, juice and bake. But more than anything else, dunk, bite, juice and bake with others.
We know it straight away. It’s so obvious it hardly needs saying. Apple Day is about community. Of course it is. Come together, celebrate together, eat and drink and dunk together.
Wonderfully, Common Ground, and all hail to them for this, just launched Apple Day and let it go. They don’t claim to own it, they don’t manage it, they don’t earn from it and they sure as hell don’t own any rights to it. That’s not how these things work.
Five-months on from Apple Day and the apple pies will be a distant memory. The apple trees around us will again be toying with the idea of blossoming and we’ll be fast-approaching another annual event. One that couldn’t feel more different: Earth Hour.
Organised by WWF, Earth Hour is an annual event that encourages us to save electricity for an hour. In what they say is a “stunning display of solidarity for our natural world”…, “Every March, millions of people around the world come together for one hour to show they care about the future of our planet.”
Now it would be too predictable to ask about the other 8,759 hours every year, so I’ll leave you to ponder that.
“Our world,” they explain, “needs our help. Nature gives us so much, from the food we eat to the air we breathe; it keeps us healthy and thriving. WWF’s Earth Hour is the perfect moment to switch off and give back to the planet. Because when we restore nature, it restores us.”
The principle is simple enough. Turn off the lights for an hour and save some electricity. If it sounds good and you’re feeling ambitious you can even “go the extra mile” and avoid using your phone and computer too. That said, WWF hardly encourage it. Instead, they provide a set of playlists to listen to, and a youtube channel to get a “dose of nature” to help you kill time while you wait for the hour to be over and can return to normality.
(Don’t worry about using up the battery – it’s only an hour, and then you can just charge it up again.)
Apparently, the average home in the UK has a slightly astonishing 67 light bulbs, including all the lamps. I’ll be off to count mine in a minute. Meanwhile, it seems fair to assume that before Earth Hour even starts, at least half of these are turned off. So that’s 33 an imaginary average home will be turning off for Earth Hour.
Given the folks in that home are “planet-conscious” enough to participate in Earth Hour, let’s assume they have low energy bulbs already (if not, they should probably spend Earth Hour going and getting some).
A typical energy efficient light bulb, below the quality of an LED one but better than an old-fashioned incandescent bulb, uses about 10 watts in an hour. So turning 33 bulbs off for an hour will save around 330 watts.
Getting a bit of that nature dosing done watching Youtube for an hour is going to use something in the region of 100 watts. So the net gain for our average home in Earth Hour is in the region of 230 watts give or take (plus an incalculable amount of feel-good-factor of course).
An average, medium two-bed house uses around 2,700 KW of electricity every year, or 2.7 million watts. So that’s a saving of around 0.0085% of their household energy use.
Every little counts though. And WWF would never claim that Earth Hour is just about saving energy. It’s also about “showing we care for the planet”. And “giving back to the planet.”
Except, of course, every little doesn’t count. Every single ‘little’, insufficient, glossed-up, tokenistic drop in an increasingly-warming ocean is, I’m afraid, a kick in the planet’s teeth. It’s gesture environmentalism. It’s a greenwashing lock-in, coordinated from the top, down to the individual, via a trademarked brand. It gives nothing back, it just takes a little bit less for an hour.
And it is miseducation.
It could hardly be better designed to leave you with the misplaced sense that the smallest, almost unnoticeable of tweaks to our lifetyles equates to sufficiency – to ‘doing our bit’. And all with the reassuring sponsorship of that panda logo.
It might save a bit of carbon, that’s true. But it doesn’t save enough carbon to make any difference to anything and crucially, it doesn’t build the foundations of anything better. It doesn’t get us anywhere. It misdirects our energies.
Compare back to Apple Day.
You might argue that dunking your head in a bowl of apples, water and other peoples’ spit isn’t going to save the world either. You’d be right there. It definitely isn’t, thank goodness.
Luckily, the Earth’s future doesn’t depend on us all attending our local Apple Day any more than it depends on Earth Hour.
But Apple Day’s very existence is a reminder of something important. That wherever the state of our delicate planet takes us, the way we may find a balance with it lies somewhere in community and in a connection to the rest of life around us.
Apple Day is a project that is about genuine, physical, human and local community. It’s impossible without that, in fact. And through that, it connects us to the almost unfathomable diversity of cultures and heritage from around Britain and the world. To stories and recipes and memories that extend down family bloodlines, have been passed around by friends or have arrived from overseas.
And it’s about trees and birds and fruit and leaves and blossom and soil. Those things we find outside the door.
What’s it’s not about is “giving back to planet earth,” like some kind of cosmic philanthropist. Rather, it’s one small part of many, many small parts, which together add up towards something like an infrastructure; an infrastructure that might allow our mislaid species to realign itself to the Earth. An infrastructure, like any infrastructure, that is made up of genuine connections.
Sorting out the mess we’ve created will take more than our participation in an annual event of any form. But if we are to discover where to put our energies in unearthing a solution to this most difficult of planetary times, it matters that we choose the activities that build something resilient and lasting, that get us somewhere.
Pleasingly, resilience lies somewhere rather nice - in the local, in strong community and in connection to the local living world that lies outside our electric homes.
Happy Apple Day.