How do alternative futures take root?
For me, practice is where enquiry becomes entangled with the web of life, where ideas encounter the resistance of reality, and where new possibilities slowly arrive through lived experience.
Alternative futures won’t emerge fully formed. They’ll arrive in our bodies in contact with the living earth and take root through countless acts of practice: through the ways we live, build, grow, make, and listen.
My own practice has two main facets: living lightly on the earth and holding myself in close relationship with the more-than-human world; and deepening into the remarkable ecosystem of people and projects pioneering land-based culture across Britain.
You'll find windows into both below.
Living small
“Need Little, want less. Forget the rules. Be untroubled.”
—Lao Tzu
Living in a tiny straw-bale roundhouse is part of my ongoing attempt to explore what a good life might look like within the limits of a finite planet. Here you’ll find reflections from my little life and glimpses into its joys and challenges.
Field notes
“The stories we tell shape not just how we think but what we conceive of as thinkable…”
— Jessica Prendergrast
These notes document encounters from the evolving field of land-based practice in the UK. Rather than case studies, I think of this as a way of paying attention: to what is working, what is struggling, what is emerging, and what is perhaps still waiting for us to become ready for it to arrive.
Field Notes
The point of land-based practice is not a retreat into the past, nor is it simply to reduce impact in the present, or even to prepare for an uncertain future. It’s deeper purpose is to reshape our relationship with ourselves, each other, and the wider community of life into one that can actually serve the greater whole.
None of this is dramatic. It happens through small, repeated, often unremarkable acts. But every act of deeper belonging is a way of tending the ground from which a culture capable of living in harmony with itself and the living world might eventually take root.
An overview of the building process, materials used, and what it cost.