Towpath Harvest 2013

It was a nice atmosphere at the Towpath Harvest this year.

Traveller Blues

Last month a family of travellers broke the padlock on the gate and moved onto my bit of field by the Towpath, which has beehives, the Tree Wardens’ tree nursery and Clive the tree surgeon’s log and chip pile on it, plus a young orchard and a load of wildlife. They were there from a house in Hartley Wintney, ostensibly for their daughter’s wedding but it turned out to be just a free campsite and dumping ground.

Below is the email correspondence about it. I hated feeling like a powerless victim, and it helped to get some much valued communal support.  The police were also helpful throughout.
The story about it was on the front page of the Surrey Herald –
http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/woman-avoids-vigilante-approach-travellers-5118521
(Please note that I didn’t ‘appeal for calm’, or ‘offer an olive branch’, actually I was seething inside, but I knew about, and wanted to avoid the terrible consequences of making enemies of them. And I said it was ‘a strange experience’ talking to people who you knew were lying to you, because there is no communication happening, and societies without communication fall apart.)

 The main problem was the hordes of other travellers that descended with trucks. They were the ones doing the dumping and trashing. The photo in the paper looked quite innocuous. This photo was more typical -

Trucks and pickups arriving at dusk

I hung onto the rubbish bags Susan had bagged up because I knew they wouldn’t have taken them to the dump as she said they would. They would probably have ended up in Dockett Eddy Lane the moment they left. My son and I went through them all sorting recycling, food for compost and rubbish into our bins, which was a bit grim with the maggots, but it was an interesting anthropological exercise. Apart from the rubbish which was much the same as ours, there was a load of Foster’s, Red Bull and Pepsi Max tins in there, which explained a lot. There were loads of little childrens plastic toys around the site, rather like our back garden in fact.
The ‘green waste’ we saw turned out to be disguising a load of builder’s rubbish and rubble. That would have ended up on Dockett Eddy Lane too, as it has in the past. My stepladder’s gone, along with other things like several pairs of secateurs used for coppicing, and they tried to steal our Tree Warden’s trailer, luckily Clive the tree surgeon rescued it and brought it back to our house, after a brief altercation. Along the towpath there had also been an attempted break-in to a barn, stolen life rings and apparently thefts from houseboats.

Another depression was the trashing of some of the young fruit trees in our new orchard. The travellers, despite the romantic view* of them as connected with nature and the open air, were as disconnected from nature as most other people. They were scared stiff of the grass snake I mentioned  that was nesting in the tree nursery. Their time there was a good opportunity to spread the word about the 55% decline in the UK of wildlife, honeybee and other major insect pollinators of our food, due to loss of habitat in garden ecosystems: paved car parking space in the front, and barbeque patios in the back. Here are my grandsons hunting for water boatmen with Clayton, Susan’s son, who she said was autistic and didn’t come out of the house normally, but had enjoyed being out in the open.

Nature Studies: Clayton and the boys finding water boatmen in the boat

It was interesting to meet people from a different world. It was interesting to see the similarities between us and them, as well as the differences. It may be distressing being lied to and stolen from and having what you value trashed, but it’s not that unfamiliar. I have had those things done to me many times including by at least two members of my family.

I don’t look up to, or down on people, so I couldn’t go along with the ‘scum of the earth’ view of them, no matter how scummy their actions. Like anyone who isn’t one of them, and a landowner to boot, I was evidently ‘scum of the earth’ to them (as were Irish travellers and New Age travellers by the way). I was painting the house and wearing painty shorts when I saw them, and they said I was an artist and must have lots of money. I said I was painting the house – if I had lots of money I would pay someone else to do it wouldn’t I?

One asked if he could keep horses on the land, until I explained that my bit only went up to the ditch and up the fence, that horses would eat the young trees and the willow coppice, and that bees and horses don’t mix either. I hope he accepted that, because horses have been put there twice before.

The Burden of Land Ownership

At the back of my mind during this time was the thought that the landowner of most of the Ranges, who I had declined to sell my bit of land to, might be behind the travellers’ occupation. This email, where he is probably pretending to be someone else, (one of a series of vaguely threatening emails which I will post one day) gives a clue: 

From: clarkekeig@

To: sallyfp@talktalk.net

Subject: RE: Willow coppicing -thank you

Date: Mon, 18 Jan 2010 16:54:12 +0000

Sallly

You where spotted trespassing on the Ranges over the weekend this is a criminal offence and must stop forthwith.

Imagine 35 gypsies camping on your land next weekend I am sure that would not please you

Regards Clarke 

Funnily enough, the landowner -real name Mel- appeared with his henchmen the following Thursday after the Sunday they had left, in the 10 minute gap when the gate was unlocked between the Tree Wardens leaving and me leaving, as I was watering trees and putting things away. My heart sank as their giant black 4WD Range Rover slunk in. It looked identical to the traveller family’s car. They said they were checking their boundaries. Mel lives in Florida, I haven’t seen him for years, but he said he was over for a few days, and had passed by the week before and thought they were friends of mine camping there. Course he did. Like the travellers, he always found it difficult to be straight with me. [He has sold the land now 2015]

The whole experience has been a lesson in how to avoid getting complacent and taking things for granted, like trust. The padlock is insanely heavy and a real pain to keep locking up. But I’m fairly sure that a combination of the lock and hopefully not making enemies, it wont happen again. Anyway, here’s the email correspondence, beginning at the bottom:


From: Sally Fletcher/Pemberton [mailto:sallyfp@beedance.co.uk]
Sent: 14 July 2013 22:39

Subject: Re: Traveller incursion update - they've gone!

The travellers left around 7.30 this evening, in amicable mood and with rubbish bagged up as agreed. So as the police said, the chain and padlock idea, along with other suggestions like blocks of concrete  or a trench in the entrance, wouldn’t have been a good idea.

The police were limited in their powers to evict because of it being on private land, but would have done by Tuesday if necessary. They have been very helpful with negotiating and liaising, and supportive throughout.

Have put a heavy duty lock and chain on the gate, and we’re just about to open a celebration bottle of wine...

Sally
Ps the wedding was completely fictitious

---

From: crispin
Date: Fri, 12 Jul 2013 17:43:43 +0100

Subject: Re: Traveller incursion - update


What if we were to get a very substantial chain and padlock and relock the gate and then alert the Police that we suspect a crime is about to be committed (i.e. criminal damage in removing chain and padlock). Would they come and watch the gate 24/7 then and thereby force negotiation?
I must say that I am baffled as to why the Police didn't move them straight on before they took up residence, which the Police are empowered to do. This is a question that should be directed to the council (who pay the Police) to ask them directly what reason they have for this inaction.


Crispin

Praemitto ex meus Pomum iPhone



On 12 Jul 2013, at 17:22, Gill W  wrote:

Hi All

I'm so glad the police have advised against your proposed action tonight, I was just about to come down and advise against it.  There is absolutely no point in getting yourself hurt and I am sure that would have been the result.

If we all have to get together and sort things out once they have left then so be it - everyone is welcome to come along to Paxmead to work out a plan of action for the future and to make any plans to put right any wrongs that have been done. I'm not defending the action of the travellers in any way but know of old what damage can be done in these situations.

Please don't let this escalate into visits to the hospital.

Best Wishes
Gill
Paxmead Warden

---

Date: Fri, 12 Jul 2013 12:24:48 +0100
Subject: Traveller incursion - update
From: sallyfp@beedance.co.uk

Traveller incursion - update Accompanied by the police this morning, I have just made a formal request to the travellers to leave, and made a statement to start the court order process rolling, if they haven’t left by Sunday after their daughter’s (not big fat) wedding on Saturday.

PC Mitchell strongly advised against parking my truck in the entrance because it would be interpreted as confrontational. He said that they were more good natured than some he has encountered, though of course he didn’t believe most of what  they  said. Including that the other travellers that have come in the evenings wouldn’t be back tonight and tomorrow.
So lock everything up folks. However the police will be regularly patrolling, including Reed Place and other vulnerable spots.

Everone who has contacted the police has been told that I gave them permission to be there. As I said in my statement and below, I have not given them permission for anything. I have done everything I can at this stage, and am just about to go and buy an extra strong lock.

Thank you everyone who has responded for your support and advice, it is much appreciated

Sally

From: Sally Fletcher/Pemberton [mailto:sallyfp@beedance.co.uk]
Sent: 12 July 2013 05:32
Subject: Traveller incursion - update


All -
Apparently the Council are obliged to act *if there is enough public outrage about the traveller incursion. Well there is. I have had enough reports of attempted break-ins, noise, sleepless nights, fear and stress to make it worth contacting the council and using people power.
Please note that I did not give permission for the travellers to stay on the land. I asked when they were going, and Susan Lamb, the only one I have been talking to, said Sunday at the latest. This was taken as implicit acceptance by me.  I explained to Susan and she understood that the land is not appropriate for people because it is an Apiary and a Tree Nursery, where bees can live without upsetting people.

Despite the lies and broken agreements, and the trashing of numerous things, I am still very keen to avoid confrontation, not because I am nice but because I know the dire consequences of making enemies of these guys.
So to avoid the influx of vehicles of the last three nights, and any more rubbish dumping, I am planning to park and be with my truck in the entrance today (Friday). Matt Hardy from across the river will hopefully photograph/ film what happens. I would appreciate any company/support/coffee anyone can muster.
I was meant to be painting the house this week.... what a nightmare

Sally
[* there is no such obligation I found out from Spelthorne’s solicitor]

From: Sally Fletcher/Pemberton [mailto:sallyfp@beedance.co.uk]
Sent: 09 July 2013 23:25
Subject: Traveller incursion

You have probably seen by now that travellers have broken the lock and gone onto my field. I have liased with them through the police, and they have assured me that they will be gone tomorrow (Wed) afternoon. They also said they wouldn't leave a mess or light any fires. Yes well....

Clive Cummings the tree surgeon who stores logs and mulch on the land has been threatened by them. I have been advised not to approach them without police escort, and I would advise caution if contacting them.

If they don't go, a court order enforced by bailiffs is the only option which is very slow and expensive. Does anyone have any experience of this situation or advice to offer?

Yours gloomily

Sally Pemberton
   
* The romantic view

The Romantic View: from Poems for Children by Rachel Field

Prof. Robert Pickard - The Honeybee Brain

Prof. Robert Pickard's bee brain talk - transcription

& recording of this talk - timings in transcript are approximate as 4 mins edited out:

https://soundcloud.com/sallybeedance/pickard-brain-talk-21-4-2012

This talk was given at the April 2012 BBKA Convention, Harper Adams College, Shropshire

:20 Thank you chairman, and thank you very much ladies and gentlemen for getting up so early in the morning to come along and indulge me in my favourite pastime, of talking about honeybees

:36 we take our lives for granted and we spend all our time worrying about money and income tax, and where the next crumb is coming from,
:50 yet here we are with a state of consciousness, sitting in a body that took 2500m years to evolve. An incredible machine. Most of us are able to walk, see, breathe, sense our environment, think about the universe, right the way up to 80
1:20 without losing more than 5% of our intellectual capability. You start to lose your ability to recall memory from about 35 onwards. The important thing there is to rehearse the memories that you want to retain. One thing we learn from the study of the bee brain is that if you rehearse the memories that you want to retain, then they will be the last to go. And that’s very interesting, because
2:00 the nerve cells respond to their usage. If they store information that you don’t use, they will eventually let it go. But if you use it, and coming to BBKA lectures like this is one of the best ways of keeping your brain at optimum performance, because if you don’t use it, you lose it.
2:14 So the interesting thing about our lives is that having taken our body for granted, and our senses, and our consciousness – I like Oscar Wilde’s idea that we’re ‘all living in the gutter, but some of us looking at the stars’. I think that’s a really nice line. Because what really matters is health and happiness, and the two are intimately related. Everything else is a very very minor concern at the end of the day. The highest achievement of the whole evolutionary process is love. Without love life isn’t worth living, and love is free.

2:56 We spend our lives worrying about all sorts of things that we shouldn’t be doing. When you look over your existence over 80 years, you remember very little. 3:11 You just actually mark out the memories of special moments. The births, the deaths, the marriages, the BBKA Conventions, and you string these together in the necklace of your life. So I would say to you, remember those special moments, and rehearse them, because they are what life is all about at the end of the day. Don’t try to remember everything, keep your brain cells working on exactly what you want to remember. People often say to me ‘ you’ve got a very good memory. That’s not what my wife tells me because I don’t even know where the coffee and tea are kept! But that’s because I spend all my time thinking about science, so I keep all the cells in my brain concentrating on that, so that it’s the last thing that I’ll forget as my brain gradually deteriorates.
4:20 a little reminder of the human time line before we dive into the properties of brains – film. The moral of this story is: life is very unexpected. When you enter a restaurant it’s always important to order pudding first!
5:17 Honeybee’s brain. When I first started working in neurophysiology I looked for a brain that was small enough to study in a lifetime, but had all those amazing capabilities that we associate with brains and the complex brain of the human being. I first started out working on ants. But I found that when I drilled through the head to get to the brain, there wasn’t much brain left! So I had to go up, so I went up to the honeybee. And in the honeybee you find everything. The only thing I’ve not been able to demonstrate in honeybees is a sense of its own mortality,

6:00 but in every other respect: short term memory, long term memory, social communication, all sorts of emotional states which I’m not embarrassed to talk about, because words like frustration can be applied to some of the behaviours of honeybees without being anthropomorphic. Take for example the Nasanov centre. If you rotate the entrance of a beehive 90 degrees, the bees come back, the entrance isn’t where it should be, and I’ve no hesitation to say that what you then observe is frustrated behaviour. The bee backs off, bonks its head into the wall – it knows that’s where the entrance was, and then it flies around the hive and when it finds the entrance, it Nasenov scents. So here’s the Nasenov gland, and it’s releasing the scent, 7:00 which has the colonial or social effect of guiding the bees to the new entrance position, and this is a mechanism for the bees to cope with bad weather when they’re blown off course. Instead of rushing into the hive, it’s a piece of altruistic behaviour, because they’re home and dry but the other bees in the colony won’t be. So they stop - they don’t rush in, they release the Nasenov scent. But it’s quite interesting: if you give them degrees of obstacle, for example if you slightly block the entrance, they’ll remove the blockage and go in. if you make the blockage more difficult, you’ll see them shoving and pushing. Then you start to trigger the Nasenov response. And if you make it very difficult for them, not only do you trigger the Nasenov response but it goes on for longer. It goes on, and the length of time of the Nasenov response has a relationship to the length of time the bee is frustrated in getting on with what it wants to do.



8:00 I’ve looked up in psychology journals the definitions of human emotion, and there are an awful lot of human emotions that meet the criteria in psychology books, so it is not anthropomorphic to say that bees can get frustrated. Because you can meet all the measurements that are required by psychologists to illustrate frustration in human beings. So this is a very, very complicated creature. I must say that when I first started to work on the honeybee I wanted to use the honeybee’s brain to get a better understanding of the human brain, but over the years have come to appreciate that the honeybee is far less robotic than I thought she was in the 1960’s when I started my biological work. The corollary is I’ve come to believe that human brain is an awful lot more robotic than I previously thought it was.
9:10 pass the buck joke golfer and caddy
9:36 Here’s just a little experiment I did on testing out the bees’ ability to sense that we can’t sense, for example the earth’s magnetic field. So here, I set up 50 boxes on the roof of the University in Cardiff. I was always very grateful for the local authority changing the flowers on a regular basis, which worked very well. What I’ve done is put swarms into boxes, with a card just underneath the lid, and I’ve blocked out any access to light, so there’s a light trap on the entrance. So these bees are going in, and they’ve got to build comb in a coordinated way. And if you’ve ever watched bees build comb, the bee that’s fashioning the cell doesn’t move. There’s nobody walking up and down with a thumb or a builder’s line to get the comb straight. Yet they build these combs down in parallel. It’s an incredible piece of engineering. You can’t do that unless you have a common reference value. So my question was: if you deprive them of an obvious reference such as wind blowing in through the entrance, or light, can they use the earth’s magnetic field as a reference, which we know that they can respond to? Because all the hairs on a bee’s body are sensitive to electric charge, and when they move they activate nerve cells underneath the cuticle. Now you can see that even in the absence of all obvious cues, they can still build, without individually moving, comb which is completely parallel and meets all their requirements.


11:29 And then I came to one box where the light trap had fallen off. And look what the bees did. They were building perfectly happily here – started comb, and I suspect aligned with the earth’s magnetic field, and then suddenly the entrance trap dropped off, and a beam of light came in, and this other group of bees started building at 90º, because they were using the light beam coming in as a reference value. So that’s just one very simple illustration of the


12;05 Complex capability of the honeybee brain. It’s only 860,000 cells; to be able to do in essence everything that we can do is spectacular. When bees memorise, they memorise not only the information like the opening of a flower, they memorise the time of day that the flower is opening, and if you teach bees to come to a particular flower, like rosebay willowherb, at 3 in the afternoon, if you anaesthetise them with CO2 for 15 mins, they’ll all arrive at quarter past 3. You can actually offset their memory, just by anaesthetising them. It is a clockwork system, but it’s an amazing system. People sometimes, when I say that the human brain is a machine, just like the honeybee brain – they feel quite offended, but they’re really feeling offended because the machines that human beings make are very simple. But if you brought 2500m yrs of research & development to build a machine, then you can build something which is incredibly sophisticated. So the human brain, like the honeybee brain, is a machine, built to do a job, but an incredible machine. Now if you don’t believe me, you must never put yourself in the hands of a neurosurgeon, because he does believe it is a machine. If he doesn’t, what’s his rationale for changing the axles and putting in new cogwheels, and cutting bits out here and there? It’s entirely based on the fact that it’s a machine, and the whole of neurosurgery would have no purpose if you didn’t believe that you were dealing with a machine when something has gone wrong, and something can be put right.


14:00 Another important thing I need to say here is there’s no such thing as a distinction between physical and mental disease. All disease is a consequence of physics and chemistry. There’s nothing metaphysical or ethereal about a brain that is malforming. If a brain is performing badly, it is because there is a chemical or physical imbalance, and the electrical fields, or the chemical signals that the cells are sending to one another, eventually can be corrected when we know enough about the detail.

14:40 Here’s another example of the honeybee’s amazing sensory system: I recognise these hairs immediately. I spent weeks and weeks working over the honeybee body, looking at every hair, then dissecting it out, seeing where the nerves in the hair went in different parts of the brain and the nervous system.





15:00 So these hairs sit on the shoulders there, and when the honeybee comes out of her hive to fly, she checks the temperature, just like a WW1 pilot: – 10º Centigrade, tick! She checks the wind velocity, the steadiness of the wind and the turbulence - tick! She looks for a patch of blue sky so that she can locate the sun through polarised light, so she can now navigate – tick! Just before she takes off and arms her flight motor, just before she switches the flight motor on, she wants to know where gravity is, because when she’s flying she’s going to be blown from side to side, so she needs to calibrate her gravitational sense. So she waves her head back on these shoulder hairs, and these hairs send signals to the brain saying you are now the right way up with respect to gravity. If you want to watch this get your head down on the ground, get very close to the entrance and watch the bees coming out. They’ll do all these little ticks and checks, and right at the end they go like this, then they go brrrrm as the flight motor builds up for the take off
16;19 Well I got this phone call, I was eating cornflakes at the time, in my pyjamas, and I picked up the phone and it said ‘Is that the Bee Man in Cardiff?’ (I’m always the Bee Man, never the A Man!), and I said ‘well I might be, who are you?’ and he said ‘you are now live on radio New Hampshire’. I was still eating cornflakes at the time. So this is live on the radio network of Eastern USA, and they said ‘the shuttle’s going into space tomorrow and they’re taking bees, and we want you to tell us how they’ll fly in zero gravity. And I thought to myself, I bet NASA doesn’t know about these little hairs, because a bee wont switch her flight motor on unless she knows where gravity is, and there is some weight on these hairs from her head. So right instantaneously, mid mouthful, I said, ‘I don’t think the bees will fly, in this multi-million dollar experiment. And then I put the phone down and thought, hmmm, I’ve got a lot of pals in the states, like Roger Morse, he’ll be laughing his hat off if I’ve just said that and got it wrong. So I was very interested a few days later, to watch the report from the space shuttle. The astronaut had the bees inside a glass cylinder, and the bees were refusing to fly. They were clinging to the outside surface, and the astronaut got frustrated, so he shook them, and the bees floated off into space, like this! If they’d just rung me beforehand, I could have told them to stick these hairs down with a little bit of pvc tape, and that would have released the lock, and the bees would have tried to fly in zero gravity


18:18 Look at this experiment by Von Frisch.


It shows a bee’s ability to perceive its environment. It’s not working like a robot, it’s changing its ways of thinking. Don’t forget a bee’s dance language can be used to communicate a source of pollen, nectar, a new home, a source of water. Even the dance language is not the dance of a robot, it involves perception. Here, Von Frisch, a very clever Austrian scientist, puts the food reward on the opposite side of a mountain.




Here’s the beehive and out come the bees. The mountain’s too high to fly over, so they fly west, north and east to find the food. While they’re feeding they’re painted with little blue dots so they can be recognised.




When they come back to the hive, the students were asked to look at the blue dotted bees and draw what dance they did, and to see how they managed to communicate this. And when they looked at it this is the dance they did – they communicated the true bearing of the food from the hive. They didn’t try to do 3 separate dances for the 3 different directions. They calculated the true bearing, and when some of the recruits came out, they flew the other way round the mountain. That shows an incredible perceptual ability of up to 7 miles. It’s about a 7 mile radius, a bee’s perception of its immediate environment. And that experiment shows categorically that they can make calculations, and then they communicate what they want to communicate, they don’t just communicate the obvious. One of the interesting things about that, is when they looked at the distance that was communicated, they communicated the true flight distance; they calculated the true bearing, but they communicated the true flight distance, so the recruits going out, in a ‘sense’, knew how far they had to go, before they started to fall, and look for a smell that they’d been given to search for.


20:40 So, Axel Michelsen at University of Odense in Denmark, built a robot bee to demonstrate how subtle this language was. Showing a video of that now. Different races of bees have different dialects just as we have around the world in genetic speciation. I always like the Italian bee because she’s so much more expressive than the English bee. She has a round dance when the food is very local. She has a waggle dance if the food is beyond 500m, then she has a sickle shaped dance which runs across this, so it makes a sickle, and the direction of travel the bees have to follow is through the centre of the sickle. That shows an intermediate position between near food and far food. When they’re introduced to Welsh bees, the Welsh bees don’t understand the sickle dance, and they’re very confused. So many interesting things; you don’t think of bees having different dialects. When you read about the dance language you see them as robotic, but honeybees are so far from being robotic. They have the dance language, the antennal tip-tapping communication, sound communication – bees can hear airborne sound contrary to what you often read in textbooks. Escov demonstrated that bees have hairs on the back of their shoulders that respond to airborne sound waves.


22:30 The whole communication between bees is fantastically personal and individual.


So Axel built this robot bee with razorblade wings. When he first ran it, the bees tried to sting it, because he hadn’t realised, because he’s an engineer a professor of engineering, that you have to give the recruits a reward for attending the dance, because all this is taking place in total darkness. The bees are perceptualising everything in total darkness, not in the bright glare of sunshine that we are looking at. And it’s very important for the forager to give the recruits a sample of the nectar, because it contains the fragrance of the flower. The bees use the dance like a WW1 rocket, they use it to get to the right position, and then they fall, and then they need the smell to search out the immediate flower as quickly as possible. So as soon as they put in a little dropper at the front, to deliver a droplet after the dance, then the bees accepted it. Pretty certain they know it’s not a bee, but they’re happy that they’re getting some communication from it, and I suspect they’re saying to one another, ‘ a bit of a funny bee this one, but ‘he’ seems to know what ‘he’s’ dancing about!’


As you know in dance language, moving vertically indicates the position of the sun, so in this case he’s set the computer to indicate 90º to the right of the sun, for the navigational heart. You’ll hear Axel’s voice in this video, then Jim Gould, from the University of Princeton.


24:30 You can number the recruits, and you can send them out to any bearing on the compass – red ones to the left, blue ones to the right…. So by colouring the different recruits and resetting the computer, and putting the students in a ring around the university a mile out, Axel was able to show that the language was so precise, you could send the bees out to particular landing platforms. So if you were a gadget driven beekeeper, you could start sending scouts out to a particular point – if you knew a rape field was over there, you could send the scouts out, and once they’d found the rape field they’d come back and tell all the others, so you’d lead the entire colony to go to that rape field. So it’s not as esoteric and eccentric as you might think.


25:44 As explained in my talk yesterday on evolution, the basic embryological plan for humans and bees is to build a metamerically segmented worm. It’s not just men who are worms, men and women are evolved from a wormy ancestor,




and each metamerical segment can generate two legs, and genetically they are modified then for each species that you’re associated with that has any complexity at all. And in the honeybee the first 6 segments go into forming the head. The first pair of legs become the antennae by genetic modification, and occasionally you’ll see a bee with two legs hanging out in front of its head, where there’s been a mutation back to produce the legs. And then you’ve got pairs of legs converted into the mandibles or the mouth parts, all packed together. And then you go into the thorax with its three basic segments and pairs of legs.





26:49 In the case of the human brain, more than 22 embryological segments are use to build our head, and that’s why we have a much more complicated brain. Every metameric segment can produce a pair of legs, it can produce a bit of nerve tissue centrally, and it can produce peripheral nerves coming out, and in the human brain of course because you’ve got 22 embryological segments crushed together, the nerves that come out, now called the cranial nerves, are really segmental nerves that have just been pushed together, and they’re all coming out in a bunch. It’s a wonderful thing, embryology, it’s the nearest thing to miraculous magic that you could ever observe – to watch the cells organising themselves is stunning.



27:38 In the human embryo you can still see the worm-like segments that are used to build our bodies, and these are the somites here, in a young embryo and it’s just rounding up its nerve cord here. This is where lack of folic acid will reduce DNA synthesis, and prevent the tube from rolling up properly, so you get spina bifida at the back end and hydrocephalcy at the front end, if the pregnant mother is short of folic acid at that time, because folic acid is essential for the synthesis of DNA.


28:10 Before the turn of this century, I made the first magnetic resonance images of the honeybee brain. As you know, water has a magnetic moment, so it will rotate in a magnetic field. So MRI scans work by putting a human brain or a bee brain in a magnetic field which you can oscillate, so then the water molecules spin. You can then beam in a radio wave, which will be deflected by the spinning water molecules. So what you’re looking at when you’re looking at an MRI scan is a distribution of water. And because the different tissues of the brain have different concentrations of water, you get a genuine anatomical representation. Of course we had to build a miniature MRI scanner in the medical physics department at Cardiff to do this. I’ve never published these, so you only see them when you come to one of my talks. I will publish them, one day when I have a chance to think about it.


29:24 We can cut the honeybee’s brain using a computer into 50 slices. Here you come to the back of the brain, and this is the most spectacular thing: here’s the oesophagus, travelling through the middle of the brain, because the ancestor had little bits of nervous tissue dotted around, and in the evolutionary process they were selected to become more and more condensed together, but they couldn’t get the gut out of the way, whereas if you were designing a brain, you would never run the stomach or the gut through the middle of the brain, because every time you had a bulky object you would distort the brain and generate spurious nerve impulses. So it just shows that this is an evolutionary process and every species is designed to make the best use of whatever has been bequeathed to it by its ancestors.


30:15 We often get to talk at cross purposes about brains – the story about the Welsh farmer leaning over the gate, along comes a Texan rancher on holiday. Looks at the sheep on the hillside, says ‘Are these all your sheep?’ and the farmer says oh yes, it takes me 2 hours to round up these sheep. Texan rancher says ‘when I get up as the sun rises in Texas, I go out in my big Jeep and travel all day, and the sun is setting when I get back at night after I’ve rounded up my cattle. Welsh farmer says ‘I had a car like that once’


31:19 My first job was to be able to operate on the brain so I designed a set of stocks like split collets. So as not to get stung all the time I cooled the bees in a refrigerator, put them into a plunger, and pushed the plunger through so as the bee comes forward, she sticks her head through the stocks, and then the stocks close behind. This means I could operate on the brain without damaging it because of the hardness of the head, so we taped down the antennae. The next job was to find a way of shaving the bee’s head so that I could implant micro-electronic chips into the brain, because the object of my research was to teach the bee tricks, for example sticking her tongue out. You can teach a bee to stick her tongue out for a particular molecule, a fragrance, and she’ll do that very reliably, and I wanted the micro-electronic circuit in the brain so that I could see which nerve cells were picking up the fragrance, and how the nerve cells were changing to store the memory.


32:20 I got a Swiss watch-maker’s drill with a tip of 1/40,000 mm. here’s the bees head before the operation, and here’s the patient afterwards – you can see the 3 ocelli now, the ocellus here and the two lateral occeli.





With the Swiss watch maker’s drill I could cut a tiny hole to insert the electronic circuit, and then teach the bees to do tricks. The advantage of this over working on cats or dogs or human volunteers, is that the whole brain is laid out like a beautiful plan of what every brain has to have. The nerve cells work in exactly the same way as our nerve cells. They have the same chemistry, and they conduct the same impulses. If I collected impulses from a honeybee brain, and fed it into your brain, your brain cells would recognise it perfectly, but what you perceive would depend on where I introduced the signals. If I introduced them into your visual cortex, you would see meaningful colours and shapes. If I introduced those bee brain signals into your auditory cortex, you’d hear meaningful sounds. So they wouldn’t be bizarre, but the nerve cells wouldn’t reject because they’d been put together by a bee brain, because all these brains are working on the same electronic principle. Here I’ve made a big hole in the bee’s head so you can see the brain. It has the same volume of brain to body ratio that we have and dolphins have. This is an incredibly complicated Formula 1 structure. I must say when I started on bees, I gradually came to appreciate all the other things like the production of honey, but in my case I definitely fell in love with the bee for her mind rather than her body.


34:11 Here’s where the key cells are that do the really intelligent work. The Kenyon Cells, discovered in 1896 by an American FC Kenyon. You can see the cell bodies there at the top, then those commands are coming down the wires or axons as we call them, running down towards the lower part of the brain and the thorax.









34:40 This is how it works – so it’s a beautiful model. The sensory information comes in from the eyes, the hearing system, the propriary receptors, the hairs on the body. It comes into this region that we call the calyx. This is like the managing director’s office, and the Kenyon cells are like a board of directors. If you put an electrode in here, you find all the information coming in, like information from a big corporate institution, all the information’s feeding in, and these 84,000 cells in each cup integrate all this information. They then make a decision. They make a decision individually. They produce an output frequency – brrrrrr! – like that, the nerve impulses feed out, because all the information is coded in frequency. It took us years to develop fm modulation of radio waves to prevent distortion, but of course nature had done it long before us. Because if you deliver information in frequency, it doesn’t get damaged by having to pass through phases of resistance, whereas if you produce your information in amplitude, every time you hit some resistance, the amplitude goes down, so your information gets damaged. 36:00 So the information is in the frequency –brrrr! – might mean a bright light, ‘de-de-de-de-‘ might mean a low light, that sort of thing – frequency modulated information. So, as each individual director makes its decision, and then it sends its decision down here, and in this region there is a 5 way exchange of information between the cells. And then what flows down here is a complete wave form, which is the chosen behaviour. In other words something has happened, you’ve decided to fly, the command comes down to fly. But it’s exactly copied into this region, the alpha lobe, which has a very complicated striated pattern. The information is fed back by sensory feedback to the eyes in particular. And other sense organs, so that what happens then is the new information is attached to this file, and fed back to the Kenyon cells. So they see the consequence of the behaviour that they’ve just commanded. It is a beautiful, elegant system. To show this in a human brain is like looking in a tangle of wool, trying to actually find where to put your electrodes to show this system. But in a honeybee brain it’s laid out beautifully for us.


37:23 If we put the micro electronic circuit here, and we inject electrical current, we can change the bees thinking process, but we can’t predict what the outcome will be, because we’re just adding information to its sentry system, and we don’t know what other information it’s getting. If we stimulate at this point, we can interfere with the coordination of the response, but we still can’t predict the output. But if we stimulate here, if we use just a very tiny current, the bee will either fly, or walk, or if it’s a drone attempt to copulate. In other words we can switch on the behaviour. But if you use too much current, when you stimulate the beta lobe, the bee will try and walk, fly and copulate simultaneously, because when you’ve switched on all the motor commands to the shop floor simultaneously. So this is a wonderful model for studying how to build electronic circuits that you can put into a human body, to replace lost nerve function: someone who’s been paralysed because some cells have been damaged in a car accident for example.


38:32 You could develop that circuitry working on a bee brain, and you can transfer that circuit and in fact I registered an American patent and two European patents using these chips that we developed on bee brains, and they’re now being used for all sorts of applications by different companies, some for medical applications, but some actually for agricultural ones, where they want to interrogate the environment between soil particles, because as you can imagine, the chips that I designed are very very small.


39:05 Here is the honeybee brain cut through, and there you can see the mushroom bodies, two, one on each side. And here, just for interest, I cut through the braula brain.






Now you remember the braula, the bee louse, is a little fly that’s lived with the bee for millions of years, given up its eyes, given up its wings. It just lives entirely with the bee, cleans up the bee’s mouth parts, and causes a nuisance when it’s present in high density. So it has a very simple life, and I wanted to know what its mushroom body looked like. And there’s its mushroom body – not! It’s given up its mushroom body completely! If you look at the fly that this braula is related to, like the common house fly, it has a well developed mushroom body, but it’s not as complicated as the bee’s mushroom body. The bee’s mushroom body can handle far more information in a more complex way. But here you see, we get the evidential support that the braula has very, very simple behaviour. It has no need to fly or navigate, no need to deal with a complex environment – and its mushroom body is virtually non existent. It’s a wonderful demonstration of that.


40:20 Here’s one of the microchips – the terminals go down to 2000ths of a millimetre across, and we made smaller ones than that. Just to give you a sense of size, here’s the microchip, and there’s the hole it left in this bee’s brain after the experiment. That’s the profile where this has been pulled out afterwards.







40:45 So what you do is put the electrode in, run an experiment recording or stimulating, then when you’re finished you can pass the current to deposit some metal ions from the ends of these terminals, which you can stain in the tissue, so afterwards you can cut a bee’s brain into 320 slices, using a piece of very sharp glass, shaving off, then you can finally leave little deposits, so you see exactly which nerve cells are sitting next to your micro electronic chip. So you can identify the cells that are doing the job. So using that we’ve been able to establish an atlas of the honeybee brain. There you can see one of the terminals in position, and I’m now going to show you the real thing – I hope this is going to work – I always have problems when I have to access programmes. What I’m going to do is access a simple graphical copy without too much detail, of the atlas of the honeybee brain that we’ve been able to put together. It’s a bit like what the butler saw – we’ll have a journey through he bee’s brain from front to back. What I believe is that in the future this will be used as a test model to develop all sorts of circuitry that can be used in alleviating brain conditions in humans in particular.


42:25 I was heartened in that, because I was asked to give a lecture to the Guided Missiles Weapon Establishment at Filton. They found the bee’s brain so suitable for devising mathematical models for guiding electronic missiles, in particular the drone brain, because the drone chases the female, locks on, copulates and then dies. It’s almost an exact model for the guided missile!


42:47 So lets see if we can find this now…sometimes if I hit the keys too quickly I will mess things up in my nervousness. Now – you can see this atlas we can access from any position. We can cut the atlas in any direction. When I first started doing this I built my model in polystyrene. I went to Caerphilly market, and I bought a second hand bacon slicer. I built several polystyrene models, and I fed them through the bacon slicer in different directions, so I could understand the 3 dimensional geometry. But now with modern computers, I don’t need to do that. I can extract sections from what I want, I can insert sections, I can do metrics for populations of cells. This will be a wonderful thing for an electronic scientist in the future. And I can animate it, so if I take some slices at 10 thousandths of a millimetre for each slice, we can then run an animation.


44:20 So now you’re travelling through the honeybee brain from front to back.






You’re seeing all the different major areas, and you have a blank tapestry, on which a micro electronic engineer can start to build circuitry. I’ll stop it in a couple of places… So I’ve stopped it at the front of the brain, you can see the antennal lobes. Here’s the median ocellos which is like a light meter measuring the amplitude of the available light, whereas the eyes on the side here are measuring images of course.






Here’s the alpha lobe set up like a lovely little filing cabinet, where the cells from here are being copied here. This stratification here is exactly matched to the concentric circles you get in the cup. It’s a filing cabinet.






45:26 there you can see the Kenyon Cell axons coming down. The cell bodies are up here, and these little elipses are the branching points coming forward to the alpha lobe.

Here’s a little telephone exchange for relating the conscious to the subconscious. Just like us, most of their brain is subconscious. In human beings, we think we are in charge of our brains but we’re not. Our subconscious works out the answers to problems, and then informs the conscious. So you’re told secondarily what your view is on a particular subject. You don’t actually work it out and tell the rest of your body. That’s why people don’t respond very well to logical argument. Sometimes the image that the brain is responding to is created in the subconscious, but then the conscious is informed of what it’s going to do. That’s why it’s such a myth to think that if you think hard enough and long enough, you’ll understand yourself and your own character; it’s extremely difficult for the conscious brain to access the subconscious brain, and the honeybee has the same problem.


46:44 Look a little bit further… here now we’re coming into the subopothageal ganglion below the oesophagus, and there you see a match up with the MRI scan that I showed you before.






There’s the oesophagus travelling through the middle of the brain, a place you would definitely not put it if you were designing the brain from scratch. Ok, lets come out of that now… I don’t like worshiping at the altar of technology but it’s been a triumph of science, so far.




47:20 Feedback is the key thing that maintains sanity in the human brain and bee brains. So when you create abnormal situations for a bee, the feedback is totally changed and the sanity goes out of the window. For example, putting a bee in a house where it flies against a window. The window is cutting out all ultraviolet light, which is one of the bees main contributors to its visual analysis. So when you bring a bee indoors and you wonder why it’s crashing against the window all the time, and doesn’t behave rationally in looking for a way out, it’s because you’ve put it in a feedback situation that is totally alien to the way it’s evolved over millions of years, and it’s not seeing naturally. If you put it in the presence of a light like this [fluorescent] , flickering 60 times a second. Now our flickerfusion frequency allows us to see it as a constant light, but the bee’s flickerfusion frequency is so acute, it can detect a light flickering at 100 times a second. So when you bring a bee into a room like this it’s in a discotheque. Everything’s flashing, so the poor old bee panics and just crashes against the window trying to get out of this hell that you’ve introduced it to.


48:50 So feedback is the key thing. If you have any depression in your life, any real problem that you have to cope with, you have to put yourself into the ancestral environment in which your brain evolved. That means going for long walks through forests, so that you can recalibrate your nervous system by giving it the correct feedback. Sitting in an office all day at an air conditioned level, sitting up, standing up, sitting down, behaving like a robot, stopping when the light is red, going when the light is green, not spitting, not copulating when you want to – leading a life that is so robotic is so unnatural to our brains that no wonder that when you produce such unnatural feedback, you get distortions in the physics and chemistry of your brain. So feedback is absolutely critical


49:40 Here’s the unborn baby getting its first feedback as it sorts out its motor programme.






It’s sucking its thumb. Initially it’s done this, then it’s gone like that, then it hits the mouth, then the signal goes to the brain saying ‘whatever you just did, that’s a useful programme, because it results in this’. And then it tries its legs. This is why heavy smoking pregnant women do such a disservice to their children, because the child is so anaesthetised with nicotine in the uterus, it can’t develop its basic motor programmes. When a child is born to a heavy smoking mother, the child comes out like this- it hasn’t developed any of its basic programmes.

50:25 This process continues and you watch your child trying to drink – my son Matthew has never forgiven me for doing little things with him such as, he tried a motor programme to pick up a cup like this. Of course initially it would be like that, then it would be like this, then suddenly, because the brain doesn’t know what’s required, it’s just trying different programming until it gets a feedback. As soon as it gets a feedback it locks on to ‘whatever it is that you just did to the cerebellum, remember that, that’s programme number 22, and it results in ‘I can pick up a cup and I can now drink’. And of course as soon as Matthew did that I put a piece of plasticine underneath the cup, to change the weight of the cup, and he went woah! And then within a few more tries he got it back in his mouth, and then I took the plasticine off, and he went woah! Anyway he did forgive me eventually, and he’s now a computer programmer for the … bank in London, and if I talk to him, all I get back is ?!... But he’s a wonderful kid


51:40 Here’s what these individual cells look like of course, and the impulses are travelling down the membranes here, receiving information, then integrating it, and then distributing it. What feedback does is allows the nerve cells to be plastered(?) So if you’re just receiving information, whether it’s a bee brain or a human brain, initially the junctions between the cells, what we call synapses, will pass the information. If the information is passed a lot, then the connections between the cells multiply, so they’re reinforcing the connection. And if the information is used even more, they will recruit other cells nearby, to join that particular programme.

52:30 So you can see this is how obsessions build up. The human brain is designed to be obsessive, because of this flexible plasticity created by the feedback. If you did nothing else but go to football matches, your entire brain will eventually be recruited to deal with football matches. So if you have an obsession, whether it’s eating or whatever, that’s causing you all sorts of trouble, the way to get out of it is to create another obsession, that doesn’t cause you any trouble, but will recruit these cells to take them away.


53.11 So when someone has an eating disorder, it’s like something flowing down a country lane. But if it’s a woman, say an unmarried mum living in a tower block, never having any proper conversation, just struggling with a newborn infant, no input of information, no exercising of the brain, large numbers of cells with nothing to do, they all get recruited for the obsession, because there’s one thing all brains do whether it’s a bee brain or a human brain, the cells respond to the information they’re carrying, which is totally different to a computer. Computers don’t change their circuitry in response to the information they’re carrying, but brains do. So if you want to become good at something, you rehearse that information. If you’ve got any spare cells around that are not fully occupied, they’ll be recruited to the information relationships that you’re working with.


54:06 Here in human brain, this is a slice through my own brain, I can’t understand anyone who doesn’t want to open the bonnet to see what’s in the engine – it’s like owning the car and not lifting the bonnet isn’t it?

 Here you can see my own brain, here’s the corpus colossus switching information from left to right brain. And here’s the key bit, the hypothalamus.

 You can take a cubic centimetre out of this big brain, the cerebral cortex here, which is responsible for a lot of our sophisticated behaviour. You can cut a cubic centimetre out of most places here and you’d hardly notice the difference. If you cut a cubic centimetre out of the hypothalamus here, you’d kill the person. Because this is the brain that we inherited from the synaptosaurian reptiles. They inherited it from the labyrinthodont amphibia. They inherited it from the crossopterygian fishes. It’s the true brain of the vertebrate, and all we’ve done over the evolutionary history of the vertebrate, is we’ve added this huge complexity on top of it, which is necessary to give us the level of consciousness that we humans enjoy at the moment: the ability to contemplate our own existence, the ability to contemplate the nature of everything.

55:27 So here’s the hypothalamus, sitting on top of the pituitary gland. It’s responsible for all our emotional conditions. It has a pleasure centre at the front and a pain centre at the back here, and there’s a satiety centre that switches off our appetite, right next to the pleasure centre here.

 So if you’ve got any spare neurons with nothing to do, they’ll lock on, and then your only pleasure in life is eating, because the pleasure centre is the value judgement centre, which determines whether or not the behaviour you’re doing should be prosecuted. So if by accident eating nuts and bolts sent signals to the anterior hypothalamus, you’d sit in the corner eating nuts and bolts all day and you’d be as happy as a mudlark. That’s how mechanical this system is. It’s amazing. 56:22 There’s the pituitary gland.

56: 32These are some of the wonderful aspects of the way in which we think, that create disorders now in modern human brains.

 Anorexics in yellow, abstaining, lack of confidence, obsession, peer pressure, unhappiness, bulimic, bingeing, depression, distorted self image, low self esteem, purging by making themselves sick, or by over exercising- the same aspect of bulimia -, simple overeating, where you’ve got indiscipline and indulgence, and then all these other factors coming in. A huge level of complexity, determining whether you have an eating disorder or not.


57:10 And just to show you how the decisions are made in brains, I’ve chosen food choice. It works exactly the same in bees as it does in humans. Imagine here now this is the human cortex, a synaptic field receiving sensory information,

and a perceptual field of the conscious here, which … the subconscious just below your choice perception, so at this point you don’t know what you’re going to choose, but at this point in a few seconds this will be tracked further over here, and you’ll perceive your choice. So let’s see what happens when you’re choosing between an apple and an orange: your sensory system picks up the smell, the shape and the colour for example, and the choice begins, lets say for apple. So in comes the smell – brrrr! – in comes the shape – de de de de! – it’s a round shape. If it’s a rectangle you might get drrrr! It’s got a greeny colour here so you get br br br br! coming in as the signal. All those frequencies are integrated, and then they pass down, and if the signals arrive at these particular positions of the subconscious, you are going to choose apple, whether you like it or not. Now the interesting thing about this is, you’ll notice that your memory of liking apples is not stapled to the record of the information coming in from the senses, (58:47) and put in a pigeon hole for you to find. Like red rag and bull. There used to be a psychology test where you said to a prospective employee, ‘here’s a red rag, what do you think of?’ and you recorded what they said. In one case the chap who got the job said ‘sex’. Afterwards the psychologist explained that this was a very good candidate for this particular aggressive salesman’s position. The managing director said to the guy when he was appointed ‘why did you say sex when you were shown a red rag?’ And he said ‘to be honest I don’t think of anything else!’ When you talk about a one track mind, it really is one track!


59:35 Let’s look at the orange. Here’s the person’s subconscious trigger for orange: smell, shape, colour feeding through slightly different pathways arriving in a slightly different position. If we compare them you’ll see we’re getting the same signal on shape, which is round, but we’re getting a different signal for smell and colour, which is as you’d expect. So now we just have to ask, ‘what would this look like if this person was developing an obsession for apples?’ Rehearse eating the apple, stimulating the pleasure centre. A rehearsal that goes on really rapidly, thousands of times in a minute that will go on. And as it goes on, if there are any cells around that are not busy, they’ll be recruited to the pathway. So after a few weeks, this is what the apple pathway looks like. It’s got thicker and thicker, in terms of the number of cells involved, and even additional short cutting pathways have been added, because this is stimulating the pleasure centre in the hypothalamus, and the hypothalamus is continually saying ‘that was great, do it again’. And so, this person has no choice now. Whenever they’re faced with the choice of an orange or an apple, the system will deliver ‘apple’ to the conscious. And that’s how obsessions are built up in bees and humans.


1:01:02 And just to give you my last example, in language:  All social creatures at the moment on the planet earth are controlled by the female. It’s only the males that control animals that are basically herding animals. and you’ve only got to go to football match to see that human beings are herding animals, and that’s why the male’s domination is still having an effect. But we’re going to gradually swap that the female behaviour has the dominating effect in politics, and as that happens we’ll become more social.


But it’s quite interesting, when we came out of the trees, we had two areas of brain that were totally devoted to three dimensional visual analysis. Huge numbers of cells, because if you leapt and you missed a branch, you’d die. You were caught by predators. You were injured. So we devoted huge numbers of brain cells on both sides of the brain. But when we came down out of the trees, and we started to form primitive societies and language was important, we didn’t actually have time to evolve a new brain lobe, so we redeployed the cells in our previous evolution that we used for three dimensional visual analysis. But there’s a sexual difference. One population is female, and one population is male, in this representation. And you’ll see that they’ve been given a language problem. In one group, the left hand side is lighting up, but in the other group, both sides are lighting up. They’ve modified three quarters of their three dimensional visual analysis capability for linguistic analysis. And I’m asking you now, which of them are the males, and which are the females?

So whose brain is this? Male. That is, the one track, single sided, one focussed, ‘I’ve got to be a goalie or a striker’ – male brain. Here’s the multi-tasking female brain – ‘you can be a striker today and I’ll be a striker tomorrow’, sharing, coordinating, multi-tasking, and it explains of course why females have difficulty in reading maps. Because they’ve switched it to something that’s far more important, because if you’re evolving a society, communication is the key thing that holds a society together. What the honeybee has, that so many other creatures don’t have, is an incredibly sophisticated communication system. Whoever communicates effectively will eventually control the politics of a society. So we’re in that transition now, between being a herding animal, and becoming truly social.


And here I am sitting on the headland of the Bay of Naples, looking out over the Isle of Capri, and I’m thinking to myself, what a wonderful world we live in, that we take for granted. And I’m also concluding, that it’s not the path that you choose in life that determines your health and happiness, it’s the way that you walk it. Thank you

Dash for ash: incinerator in Shepperton

Went to this meeting of Surrey County Council's Planning and Regulatory Committee last Friday 13th March 2015 http://mycouncil.surreycc.gov.uk/ieListDocuments.aspx?CId=122&MId=4397&Ver=4

I should have been looking after my grandson. It would have been much better use of my time, which I value as I get older, even if no one else does. And my numerous emails about the incinerator seem to have been a waste of time too.

This was the 4th time I'd been to County Hall about this issue, definitely the last. They've all been a futile charade*. Never again do I want to see that condescending chairman Keith Taylor, and Ernest Mallet MBE and the one next to him.

The purpose of the meeting was to stall the planning process and make a fresh application necessary. The chairman's casting vote made sure that didn't happen.

by raising the issue of 'mature' trees, which was of course not the main issue. Arguing about trees as screening was an implicit acceptance of the incinerator. The core issue is whether the incinerator represents value for money, which of course it doesn't:

 'In the House of Commons Select Committee meeting, Margaret Hodge stated about the Eco Park 'I cannot see why you are giving money to Surrey County Council to build a hulking great incinerator in a place where nobody wants it and where it isn't needed.'…The view of many members was that Defra had continued with a 'legacy' project rather than looking at it afresh.  They stated that many European Countries have built too many of these things and are now having to import RDF (Refuse Derived Fuel) in order to feed them.'

Why does this economically and environmentally unviable project persist? *Because it would be too expensive for SCC to get out of the contract with SiTA.

The focus of objections has been on the emissions and pollution that would get produced by the incinerator. 

What has never been questioned is the actual production of the waste, and our role as individuals in producing it. We're all destroying the planet's biodiversity, ecosystems, soil, the air; taking not giving back, and wasting resources at an accelerating rate. The incinerator is part of that process; it would require us to produce waste to feed it 24/7, which is hardly an encouragement to 'REDUCE, REUSE, RECYCLE' is it? We don't have to buy plastic packaging, which is the main content of the waste. If we stopped creating waste, the incinerator wouldn't exist.

  

I used to enjoy going to the dump. I would take trade waste to the bottom bit and bring recycling to the top area. You could rescue things between boot and skip - 'are you throwing that away?' Not any more. Someone bears down on you, closely watched by CCTV camera, saying it is SITA's property now. So perfectly serviceable things get chucked and you can't do anything about it.

With one or two exceptions, staff used to be friendly and helpful. Now they're too scared of the cameras. It feels as if SITA is doing us a big favour by allowing us to take our recycling there. They are not good on PR, and not encouraging of our efforts at recycling.

---------------------------
I haven’t had a leaflet about this, so am forwarding this to anyone who cares about the environment, about the proposed incinerator which will impact not only locally but on the whole planet.
Here is a link to an interesting R4 programme earlier this year about this subject:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01qm4ph
By 2020 the UK must significantly reduce its landfill habit. A recent
government report warned that we would run out of landfill space by 2018 and
a European Directive means we must reduce the amount of waste sent to
landfill from 48% to 35% or face big fines. Next year landfill tax will hit
£80 per tonne. Unsurprisingly there has been a huge rise in planning
applications for incinerators. 90 are proposed to add to the 30 currently in
operation. Waste is big business. Tom Heap visits existing sites where our
rubbish is currently being shipped abroad to create energy and heat in
Europe and asks whether it is time we followed suit.
New technologies such as gasification are currently being developed which
will provide even more heat and power from our residual waste and they
promise to be far cleaner than the mass burn incinerators on the continent,
yet opposition remains strong. 'Costing the Earth' hears from local
residents who fear the health implications if dioxins formed in the high
temperatures are released. Environmental campaigners argue that even if the
health risks can be addressed this solution only creates more carbon dioxide
emissions when what we really need is more recycling and less initial waste.
In his film 'Trashed' actor Jeremy Irons looks at how our waste affects our
health and that of the planet. Tom asks if it's time for a national strategy
on what goes into our bins and where our rubbish ends up.

Sugata is inviting parents and teachers everywhere to set-up a Self-Organized Learning Environment by downloading the SOLE toolkit and creating their own SOLE environments.

http://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_build_a_school_in_the_cloud.html?source=facebook#.UT-McAOMp-R.facebook

Food and cancer

south mediterranean is less susceptible to cancer because the food is less highly processed than here


http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01shstp

Shared planet

it's not the human population, it's what they do. Practically everything we do, from paving front gardens, to 'eco' tourism, to monoculture, causes decline in wildlife


Press the link to view the site

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b02mqmqc