09 Mandy Haggith on poetry as a kind method for climate and nature action

In this online chat, author, poet and community activist Mandy Haggith talks from her Assynt croft in the north-west of Scotland. She is using poetry to create a sense of agency when so much seems bleak. We hear of community development in Scotland, how policy has enabled local people to but estates, islands and urban plots. It’s hard, though, to create the income streams for local people. Mandy talks of the use of poetry in local projects on nature recovery and reducing fossil fuel dependence. She says, “At least, verse can’t make it worse.”

She says, “Little changes can snowball into vast change. We don’t all need to be heroes.”

Mandy’s books include The Lost Elms, five collections of poetry, and five novels, including The Last Bear; Bear Witness, The Walrus Mutterer. See her website: https://www.mandyhaggith.net/ 

Mandy recommends Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha and Barbara Kingsolver’s Prodigal Summer. 

Her action: go and plant a tree (if you have the resource). Do imaginative time travel: go into the past, find things that are wonderful, beautiful, uplifting. However far you went back, now go forward the same amount of time into the future, and take that good thing with you. Imagine how that feels.

People feel better. It seems to generate hope about the future. 

My new book will be supporting this podcast, and will be published in March 2027 by Unbreaking/5m. It’s called "Bamboo and Butterfly: Transformation and Story for Climate and Nature Recovery." 

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:05

Well, it's a great pleasure to welcome Mandy Haggis to the pod, um, author, poet, uh, activist crofter in Asynt, author of novels for children and adults, poetry collections, and recently the wonderful Lost Elms, which we will come to in a little while, I think. But Mandy, I wonder if you would like to just start by telling us a bit about yourself, your home, uh, your croft in Asynt, where you are at the moment.

SPEAKER_00 0:34

Um, yeah, so I am the luckiest person in the world. I get to live in Achmelvig all year round. Um, people come here from far and wide to come and see our very um photogenic beach and um very beautiful place. But yeah, I get to be here all year round, which is lovely. And I live on a um 11-hectare croft with my husband Bill. It's his croft, he's the he's the official crofter. Um and um yes, um it's we call it Wonderland because it is. Um it's you know, not necessarily it's not it has interesting weather, it has lots of weather. I like that. It has what is described, I think, really beautifully as a as a great light climate, um, which is a term that I've only just recently come across. But in in the winter, for example, we get extraordinary light with low angle light, very, very long nights. If the if they're dark, we have absolutely dark skies, so you know, the chances of northern lights and and so forth, and lots of starlight in the winter, which is really fantastic. And then in the middle of the summer, it the sun basically hardly sets at all up here. So um we get long, long, long, long, long days and wonderful dusky light that fades into dawn light and and things. So, yes, it's a fantastic light climate.

SPEAKER_01 1:52

And uh that's a lovely term. I hadn't heard that actually. I I get that, actually. The light climate, having having been and worked in kind of northern climes, quite you know, Arctic, close and arctic climes. Yeah, that kind of feels right, exactly. Well, that's a nice setting for for um the remarkable changes that have been happening in land ownership and community development in Scotland. So two laws uh encouraging local buyouts of estates and and um islands, but actually the Ascent Development Trust began well before those came into play. So Ascent was one of the forerunners. So I wondered if you could tell us a bit about a little bit about kind of what community development looks like um in ASINT and some of the ups and downs, because it's not always, you know, life's not always up, is it? But um uh there are there are continuing performance performance challenges when it comes to community development. But it's something that you're at the centre of, and we'll explore a couple of methods that you've been using for that as well in a moment or two.

SPEAKER_00 2:57

Yeah, sure. So my my husband Bill, he was one of the um founding um members of the Ascent Crofters Trust, which was um the organization that kind of made history back in the early 90s by um taking when the when the land was sold by the the sporting landowner who'd owned it, um, the crofters ganged up together and and mounted a bid to buy the land for themselves and formed a company, um the Ascent Crofters Trust, and bought it, um, I think much to everybody's surprise. And that in many ways by making the impossible possible kind of kickstart of the land reform movement in Scotland, and then legislation kind of started to follow and make it a legal right for communities to have um the right to buy and the the right in the case when land um came up on the market for sale the sale to be stopped while the community tried to raise the money to be able to buy it themselves. Um, and we we were actually so that was in the the early 90s. In the late 90s, we bought a chunk of um woodland, and then in 2005, when the when the law kind of caught up with it with what was going on on the ground here, um that we were the first community to use the Land Reform Act in earnest and actually stop a sale in the open market and raise three million quid to enable us to buy um the four mountains of um uh Sylvent and Canisp and Kilmore and Kilbeg and also the big house at Glen Canisp. So we became the proud owners at that stage of a total of about 68,000 acres in um in the parish, which is and each of those pieces are are run by a different community organisation. Um, and so we we are very rich in community organizations here, many of whom have got a lot of of assets um and and resources in capital terms, anyway. Um, of course, we're we're duty bound not to flog them on the open market, that's the the kind of the whole point. So being asset rich doesn't make doesn't make us um wealthy in the sense of having enough money to pay the bills and and all that sort of stuff, and that is the ongoing struggle. You can have a lot of assets, but actually um having the um the revenue um you know that enables you to cover all your all your running costs can be a real challenge. Um and um Ascent Foundation certainly who bought the mountains ran into that difficulty. Um, and yeah, I think it's common to a lot of community organisations that they that they face that that ongoing challenge that you can't get anybody to subsidize your running costs. Um we don't have any renewable energy um schemes which are providing any kind of community benefit um apart from one small hydro run by the crofters. Um but yeah, a lot most communities in this part of the world have got some kind of renewable energy kind of benefit coming in. Um we're yet to um yet to achieve that. But you know, we we also we own the um we built the leisure centre um and we also took over the old people's um facility and we took over the transport facility, and so there's a lot of community-owned stuff going on here. Um the Asset Development Trust was actually an organization set up to in many ways act as a coordinating body for all of these other different community bodies that that have have assets. Um and um and it it it does it's it does, it is also it owns the the um what used to be the fisherman's mission that we bought and um and now have that run as a as a cafe and so forth, and the football pitch and and um and now a new patch of land that we're trying to build houses on as well. So yeah, there's a lot of there's a continuing and continuous stream of community um activity going on here, trying to um make life livable because it's um we're quite short of the sort of state-run resources that m people in urban areas take for granted, I think.

SPEAKER_01 6:55

Yeah, yeah. Well, that's an amazing picture. I mean, I think people don't realise quite exactly what's going on there, partly because of the sort of Westminster stroke London-centric view of the UK as a whole. Um, but you're a long way from Edinburgh as well, let alone kind of um Southern England, um, and that kind of knowledge as to what um community development trusts and and crafting trusts and others um have been able to do, that level of kind of ambition and interest and the and the continuing problems of finding a revenue stream, um, you've got to bring money into places somehow, um, haven't we, in order in order to keep the stuff going. I mean, just maintenance costs, let alone coming up with new ideas. But it does sound kind of amazing, really, um, all that all you've achieved.

SPEAKER_00 7:43

Um the most recent development and uh which I think is really exciting is that ASNT isn't working alone, um, perhaps as much as it has in the in the past, because there's now a thing called the Northwest 2045, which was um set up to kind of come up with a vision for how we were going to respond to the um the requirement, the legal requirement for us to to reach um net zero carbon emissions by 2045, and seven community council areas of which Assent is one, so Koyach to the south, and then us, and then Scarry and Kilobervi and Durness, which takes us up to the the top left corner, the northwest corner, Cape Wrath, and then the two um uh community council areas, um Tungskara and Malness, and then um Betty Hill and Strathneva and um Al Nahara. Um those two community uh council areas as well have we've all ganged up together as one area of very sparsely populated um and but very large um uh patches of land who all have very similar problems. And so, for example, we've we found that of those seven areas, only two of them have any functioning childcare facilities at all. Um, and um, and so which is obviously a massive problem if people want to kind of come and live and work here and things if there's no childcare. And um, and that becomes that comes down to sort of local authorities not being able to kind of join the dots of getting the right people with the right certificates in the right places and all that sort of stuff together. And but but by working collectively as people on the ground, we've been able to get now all seven of those areas have got childcare facilities again that we're running at our own hand effectively. Um, and and it's the it that kind of activity happens over and over again, and and it's quite fun that we've now reached a point where where we are ganging up together with our neighbouring communities and forming a kind of like bigger community with a bit more muscle and a bit more kind of clout to be able to kind of push for the sorts of changes that we need to happen at at governmental level and and with big business and stuff like that.

SPEAKER_01 9:45

Yeah, that's a model I've seen in other countries of of groups organizing within their communities and then federating upwards to kind of to, as you say, to get collective strength with that. Um uh and then you know, quite often people from that then find ways of getting elected to kind of formal government bodies if they want to do that, um, but as a way to kind of further influence policy later on. But that federation is the kind of next is the next step, isn't it? Very important.

SPEAKER_00 10:17

That's right. But yeah, because I mean it's a very big area. There's about it's about 300 square kilometres between the seven parishes, and we're a population of just over 3,000 people um in total around here. So it's it's pretty much the lowest population density of anywhere in Europe. Um, so um yeah.

SPEAKER_01 10:36

Yeah, amazing. Uh amazing. Um well look t tell us a little bit about um uh some of your projects. So uh community development has got uh great possibilities and is hard climate action, also hard, as you said, you know, the the 2045 target, um uh which gives a kind of direction towards resources and also kind of uh what we might do in communities. Um you had a project, Pete, Diesel, and seaweed, which was a lovely way of kind of linking up different kinds of well, two assets and one kind of you know means of transport, but it's uh it's an interesting one where you are. Tell us a little bit about what what you've been doing with that project.

SPEAKER_00 11:19

Yeah, so that was that was a collaboration with the Northwest 2045, and we wanted to um, yeah, it was it was a project to help design the transition to net zero, and um we wanted to engage people who were not necessarily getting involved in the conversations yet. Um and we focused on three topics that we knew were not the kind of mainstream topics of conversation, like you know, road, everybody talks about road transport, everybody talks about household energy consumption, um, food production and and stuff. But so those three are really, really significant in terms of the carbon um uh emissions in our part of the world and the potential and opportunities that they create for new livelihoods in the area. So the first was peatland, um, where if it's damaged, then it emits a huge amount of carbon. We have a lot of peatland here, which is not in a very good state, but it can be healed, it can be restored, and for healthy peatland is a net sequester of carbon and therefore is kind of can be a really positive part of that achievement of net zero and getting the balance right. Um, and it's um opening up new opportunities for um jobs, very, very skilled digger drivers, um, which is something that lights the eyes up in young, um, particularly young men, it seems, and teenage boys who you tell them there's potentially really important jobs to be had here. Um, and um, but and also ecologists and so forth, and also income possibilities from the carbon credits if restoration is successful. Um, and then the diesel bit, we're specifically looking at alternatives to marine diesel because um Lochimba here has the second highest fish landings in the country, and that's because we're the first kind of mainland um port for the North Atlantic fishing industry that mostly French and Spanish big fishing ships are out there for kind of week-long fishing cruises and come in, empty their fish into long lines of articulated refrigerated lorries that drive the catch to France and Spain, and then those ships fill up with diesel in our port and then head back out for another week and repeat endlessly. Um, and so our diesel sales are very big from our small harbour here. And um, it's obvious that the the shipping industry, the fishing industry, all boat use is gonna have to shift onto something other than diesel, and they're quite slow in actually getting to grips with the alternatives that potentially offer really big benefits for our harbour development, like electrification and hydrogen and and so forth. So we wanted to have a conversation around that. And then the third area is also marine. Um, and what these three topics have in common is they're all kind of hidden. I mean, the peat, you can't, you know, there's no fumes from damaged peat, you know what I mean, but it's it's underground. The um the marine diesel emissions are all over the horizon, and seaweed is lurking there just under the surface of the water as a very important um carbon sequester and also potentially alternative um material if we we can cultivate it here to offer alternatives to um current kind of fossil fuel-based things like plastics and and and cosmetics and and so forth. So um we're we're looking at a community-led um uh three communities together leading a seaweed cultivation um enterprise here. So that was the third topic, and um they're all there's a very famous band here called Pete and Diesel, um, and there's a um based in in the West Niles, just over the water. Um, and um and then there's a very famous line by Norman McCague where he comes out of the Koolag Bar and and smells um uh uh frit fish brine and seaweed, and I kind of concatenated these two things together to kind of to form yeah, Pete Diesel and Seaweed as what the what the the project has been, and in a kind of nod to the fact that my methodology is poetry, and so I do events with people, get people chipping in ideas and thoughts and feelings and so forth, and then I and I do interviews with people and transcribe them and gather words and phrases in various ways and then make poems out of them. Um, and that's a different kind of way of doing research, both from the point of view of the analysis, using poetry as a kind of distillation and synthesis kind of tool, but also it it develops it it results in research findings that are very different from your average kind of like research report that's that sits dusting on a shelf somewhere. Um, and that that's that's fun. That that means that both the people who are likely to kind of get involved in the research activities because they're kind of fun and often outdoors and involve words, get people involved who might not otherwise get involved, and then the findings, I can get those findings to people who would not ever read a research report, but I can pop up at a community meeting or something and and you know perform a poem or read a poem, and and that gets them the messages out there that that so that it's shared in a way that is perhaps unusual and I think better personally.

SPEAKER_01 16:32

Brilliant. I love it, I love it. Um yeah, that's a phrase that one can use, which is when people see data coming, they duck. There's kind of like, yes, data is is needed. You need to know how much carbon of good peat will suck up and how much carbon, uh different forms of seaweed kelp or eelgrass or whatever it is, seagrass. Um uh but once you know that, then you've still got to one has still got to sell the story to people to say, look, this is the thing, you know, this is what electric um uh ships might look like in the future, and this is how we would generate. I mean, you you can it's easy to imagine, difficult to get there, the that they could be the renewable energy generation within your region that would supply the electricity and the electricity sector, replace the diesel, and you still have the fishing, but you've suddenly got a huge resource coming in from the purchase of electricity. Of course, there's the boats need to be charged and all of that, but that's gonna happen. It's going to happen in the next period of time. Absolutely. It's just a question of how quickly we can make that happen. Um lovely. You you've you've you've you said this lovely thing when we talked previously about verse can't make it worse, um, which is a kind of great way of just saying, look, words and story matter, poetry matters. Um tell us a bit about uh your pooling the results uh piece, uh and perhaps you might like to kind of read from it a bit as well, because I think it's a kind of gorgeous way of getting feedback from the community and telling them what the outcomes are, but putting it in a popular cultural framework that actually gets across feelings because feelings are really difficult to get across in all this. Certainly they're impossible in data, largely, but in story, you can get feelings across.

SPEAKER_00 18:18

Um yeah, absolutely. And I feel and I think that's absolutely imperative. And I m my my own academic background came I I did I did artificial intelligence back in the 90s, um, you know, eight late 80s, 90s, back when that was a really newfangled thing, you know. And uh so I've I kind of came out of a of a um of a science background, and I'm very and I left AI, I mean I could I put it behind me as it were on the basis that I didn't like what direction of travel it was was going in, and I kind of feel I'm a bit vindicated by the way things have have turned out. But I I was very I used to get, yeah, I I and I worked a lot on forest um forestry and forest research and and again got um got very much convinced that the sort of technological approaches that we take to research are not going to solve the problems that need to be solved, and that one of the key reasons is that we do we do all leave our feelings at the at the door and we expect research participants to leave their feelings at the door, and yet how we respond to the kind of multiple problems that we're facing, whether that's biodiversity or climate change or whatever, are all driven actually by how we feel about things, and so we are completely kind of endlessly repeatedly missing the point if we don't acknowledge that people are sitting with often very, very difficult feelings around these topics and around the future, and um so in in the PDs and Seaweed project, I didn't want to overpromise that that we were going to somehow be able to create impacts that were going to make the world a a much better place. And so I think the line you call what, but at least verse can't make it worse, comes from comes from like you know, wanting to be modest about and realistic about what the um what expectations people should have about what the impact is going to be. Um but but also, yeah, I mean it is a little sort of reminder that actually um you know poetry is is is something that can get to places that other research methods don't don't get. So the first thing that we did in the project was we ran what looked like a fairly conventional survey um online, and and we two of those questions um which came from Northwest 2045 were what's your worst fear about climate change and what climate action gives you hope. And the the um I did the analysis of of the results of of the um survey and the answers to those two questions, I set them out in um a way reminiscent of the way that the football pools used to get read out on the Saturday afternoon. So people of a certain generation um kind of would would recognize it. So I'll I'll just read the results. Pulling the results. Polar bear fears three, hope none. Fear of extinction of species, four none storms and floods and sea level rises, five. Hunting trees, three, two migration technological progress.

SPEAKER_01 22:03

Brilliant. Love it. Very nice. I like this. I like the way that you use kind of cultural symbols that we understand and the kind of phraseology in the language, the setup there of the football results, um, and the feedback there is brilliant. Um, but also the the sense of a little bit of hint of good, but also quite a lot of just how hard it is and how difficult things are. Finding hope is is a really difficult thing, isn't it? Um and and using that to drive to drive kind of agency, really, you know, uh people's capacity to want to do stuff. Um so yeah, lovely.

SPEAKER_00 22:42

I mean, it's that's just the results of the survey. And it's so like it was not my I was not creating in the sense that I mean these are these were genuinely the phrases that people used in in their responses to the survey. And the reason and I wrote the poem because I was stunned that the answer from four people about what is the um, yeah, what climate action gives you hope, the answer was none from four different individuals unprompted. And that just kind of struck me that oh, and then I I did some I did an egg uh an event with some young people and asked them how they were feeling about the the future and climate change and the and the it was quite clear that that they were despairing and there was no hope there at all. And it was really worrying, and it became a sort of urgent thing at that point with the project partners that we sat down and said, look at these results. We need to actually kind of make sure that what we try to do with the remainder of the project is see if we can actually generate some hope here, because this is really, really worrying and really dire. Um, and so it um and I think having the poem in that form, having the the results in that form, that it's very easy to be able to show people this is what people are saying here. Um, and we need to do we can't just stand by and just do nothing um in that in that case. So, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 23:57

Thank you. Um uh a quick couple of words, a couple well, more than a couple of words, about about your lovely book, The Lost Elms. Um lovely story of the great elms. The 25 million, I think you say, die in the UK as a result of the of the um Dutch Elm disease, as it's called, um, striking in the 70s onwards. Um, and you begin in a beautiful way with this story about growing up in an elm wood, uh, the magnificent tall trees, and then they start dying, and the ghosts taking over, and the landslide that stops you getting to school, and then picking up on the beautiful elms. Tell us a little bit about that, but then also they seem to be above the the temperature isocline in Scotland so that the the Beatles didn't come that far north. You still got the midges, but not the Beatles. But then lately climate change has uh brought the Beatles as well. So there's a kind of twist as well, isn't there? Um it's a gorgeous book, it's brilliant. I really like really liked it.

SPEAKER_00 25:05

Oh, thank you very much. Thank you. It's been it's been delight, actually, that I thought it was a bit niche. I was asked to write this book after the oldest tree in Europe um died. Umest elm tree in Europe died, which was the Bewley Elm, um, which was 800 more than 800 years old. Um, and we know because it was planted by the monks who built the the priory at Bewley and the and the back in the 1200s, and the the trees, the the priory's long been a ruin and the trees remain standing. The last one of them succumbed to Dutch elm disease in 2022. And I was asked to write this book, and I thought it would be a very niche thing um to write a book about elms, but I was up for it because of the fact that I had that childhood experience of growing up in a woodland and watching them all die when I was a kid, and um, and then when I moved to Edinburgh in in my um early 20s, the disease had arrived in Edinburgh and that I watched them all die there as well. So I kind of feel like I've had this sort of lifelong relationship with with elms, and they are culturally hugely important as a tree of of death and of mourning and of offering comfort after death and and to grievers, and in and that's sort of pan-Europe and well globally really, um, wherever elms are, they they seem to have this this resonance about them. And my own experience in in writing the book was that I I went through a very, very dark time. Um, my my father died, I'd had a very difficult relationship with him, and at the point where he we died, it was like a whole lot of stuff just kind of got me in one in one false roof. And I I was unable to do most things, and yet somehow I was able to do anything if it was elm tree related. And so, and the elms gradually um kind of gradually healed me. Even on the worst days, it was possible to go out and be with an elm tree or find out something else extraordinary about elm trees, because they are fascinating trees. And although they do have that connotation with death, they also have all sorts of other cultural connotations, and there's lots of folklore that links them to other more positive things as well. And um, the you know, the very the Scandinavians believe the very first woman was made from an elm tree, for example, um, while the first man was made from an ash. And anyway, so it was the writing of the of the book about elms felt like it was a kind of personal healing. So there's a kind of strand of memoir that goes through the book. Um, but also I couldn't just like you say, I mean, the the there's a climate change connection in the in that the beetles need really warm um summer weather to to fly, and we've always been kind of too far northwest of the kind of warm conditions that they like, but that's changing with climate change, and that's why the there's this sort of inexorable creep of the disease north. Um, and we still touch wood are in the last mainland kind of refuge for Dutch elm disease, for elms, not getting Dutch Elm disease. And we um and I but I couldn't sort of write this book and take the time that that required and stand by and do nothing while waiting for the disease to come and take these beautiful trees that we still have. And so I set up a local community project with um with all sorts of interested people, including the primary school children, who took elms hugely to their heart and adopted the elm tree nearest to the school and called it Elmo and have been looking after it, but also got really involved in kind of planting the next generation of elms and making sure we've got a kind of really wide genetic diversity of elms in the area and trying to make sure that our elm population is as resilient as it can possibly be at the point when when, because it probably is when rather than if, we do finally um get the beat the pesky beetles in the area. And we've had one scare and it turned out actually to be okay. Um, and we were declared last year again, Dutch Elm disease-free. So, like, we'll just hope that that carries on. But the lovely thing about that was the discovery of how planting trees at times when it's quite difficult, I think, to find positive things to do with respect to like the natural world, planting a tree and thinking about the kind of long-term future of um, because when you plant a tree, it's an act of faith in in the next several hundred years. Um, and and also thinking at a landscape level rather than just sort of at an individual level. That was a really big part of what the project generated.

SPEAKER_01 29:13

Both of those kind of open up perspectives, don't they? Time into the future, breadth in the in in thinking at the moment. And perhaps that has an echo back into people being able to think more than just about themselves, but thinking more community, ultimately, yeah, the world as a whole. Um, you know, if we're going to solve these things. Um, yeah, fantastic. Um, we've got a couple of of mature elms in just on the edge of the village where I live that have survived. So the genetic material is there. But also there's a village about about six or seven miles away from here called Elmset, and it has a row of eight mature elms on the road that are still still there. Oh of course they would be at Elmset, you know. I mean, it's kind of like you know, brilliant. Um so we know that the the resistant genetic material is there in adults. Um so uh you I hope that those these efforts are successful in the future. Uh let's come to a quick fire kind of few finishing things then, uh Mandy. Um heroine or hero for you?

SPEAKER_00 30:14

I yeah, it's a really interesting question. And um, and I don't like the idea of heroes and heroines. I I kind of think that I taught a module called heroic literature at the university for several years. Um, and and I think that there's there's both the problem with heroes and heroines, it's it's a part of a kind of Western mindset that is very individualistic, actually, that is kind of part of the problem. Um, and so um we the really interesting solutions to everything are ones that involve lots of people working together and being collaborative and not relying on a single hero or heroine. Um and and also the the whole idea of heroism is it demands too much of us as individuals as well, and leads us to feel that you've got to be heroic in order to make a difference in the world. And we know, you know, the butterfly effect is a real thing that little changes s can snowball into vast, vast um changes, um, and that we don't all need to actually adopt hero heroine roles in order to really make a significant difference. So um yeah.

SPEAKER_01 31:19

It's too much of us, isn't it at times? Yes, yeah, exactly. Lovely answer, great. Um, your book or cultural item to recommend? What what what what would you recommend?

SPEAKER_00 31:29

Um Yeah, this is a really difficult thing to answer, but what I um what I go back to, and there are two there are two books to go back to. One is Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha. I'm not a Buddhist, but it's just an amazing text and story of a man who who kind of finds peace by relinquishing that ego and and uh just getting into a big river, which is fantastic. But then the thing also Barbara Kingsolver I go back to repeatedly, and she's an amazing author, amazing writer, and and particularly somebody I admire for her ability to produce stories that are told from multiple perspectives simultaneously. And so, you know, um, and my favourite of those is Prodigal Summer, um, which is um a story about how we relate to the modern human world, but also how we relate to each other across the generations. Um and it's got a character in it called Nanny Rawlings, who I absolutely aspire to become, a little old lady who keeps bees and plants apple trees and really does a power of good in the world at the same time. And like, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 32:35

There you go. That's that's a great aspiration. Lovely. Yes, I uh yeah, I agree. Yeah, great. Uh one top action. Uh, what what what should or could people do um uh in their communities when it comes to these sort of nature, climate, community, social equality kind of challenges that we're all facing.

SPEAKER_00 32:55

Um yeah, I mean, I think that I mean, there's obviously go go and plant a tree, it's a way of generating hope. But I think only some people can do that, only people some people have got that resource. But what we've all got the resource to do is I think I'm I'm doing, yeah, is to imagine what I call imaginative time travel. Um, and and I think that, and it's something that people can do immediately and do repeatedly, and I think it's a a really important kind of imaginative gymnastics that we all need to get get better at doing, which is to go into the past and find things from the past that um are good, things that that were were beautiful or or uplifting, or so it might be a personal memory of your of your own of some time when you were happy, or it might be something to do with an ancestor or a time past that you wished you lived in, but to kind of imaginatively go there really richly to use all five senses to really kind of immerse yourself imaginatively in that past moment. And then however far back in time you went to find that good thing, so it might be that you went 20 years into the past, might be that you went 120 years into the past, then go imaginatively that far into the future and take that good thing with you in some way or another. Try to imagine the future world with that good thing in it, and again, use all five of your senses to really richly imagine a future world that has got that good thing glowing still there within it, um, and then come back now. Um, and and I I do this exercise with lots of people in my research, and my ex and my experience is that people feel better as a result of doing it, and feel and I and I I hope that what it's doing is that it well I see it and I ask it seems to generate hope about the future, and I and so I that's my aspiration that we by by doing that kind of yeah, much more positive imagination of the future we'll actually be in a position to to to generate a much more positive future.

SPEAKER_01 34:56

Lovely. It's a kind of burning sun, really, isn't it? Right at your heart that you're creating for the future in that way. Yeah. Um Mandy, Mandy Haggard, thank you so much indeed for coming on the pod. It's been gorgeous to hear about uh the verse doesn't make it worse, it makes it a whole lot better. It really does. And indeed, that's something everybody can do, isn't it? I mean, we've all got words of some sort. Um, there's no special qualification needed, there's just a way of of interacting with the world to come up with something that tells a bit of a story, and that imagining going back and forward is a is a gorgeous technique. So um thank you so much. That's great. Thank you, that's a pleasure. Thank you for having me.