by Lesley Docksey
Writer, Dandelion Salad
England
October 3, 2013
Image by Chris_Parfitt via Flickr
Till kicked and torn and beaten out he lies
And leaves his hold and cackles, groans, and dies.
John Clare – The Badger
The lanes of Somerset and Gloucestershire are being haunted by people from all walks of life but they all have one thing in common – they want to bring a halt to the killing of badgers. Continue reading
by Lesley Docksey
Writer, Dandelion Salad
England
October 3, 2013
Image by Bobasonic via Flickr
When midnight comes a host of dogs and men
Go out and track the badger to his den
John Clare – The Badger
One always knows that, when government Ministers resort to defending Ministry policy in the local press, they are losing the argument with Joe Public. So it came as no surprise to read in the Gloucester Echo the justifications for the highly unpopular badger cull as written by Owen Paterson, UK Minister for the Department of Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra) – Continue reading
by Lesley Docksey
Writer, Dandelion Salad
England
September 27, 2013
Image by chrisjohnbeckett via Flickr
The UK Ministry of Defence is worried; worried that the public have become ‘risk averse’ to the point that we won’t want to go to war anymore; so worried that in November 2012 they wrote a report – The Implications of Current Attitudes to Risk for the Joint Operational Concept – made public today by the Guardian. The report, while purportedly studying ‘risk’, is really asking ‘How do we sell war to the public’? Continue reading
by Lesley Docksey
Writer, Dandelion Salad
England
September 17, 2013
“…we must consider that we shall be as a City upon a Hill, the eyes of all people upon us; so that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken and so cause him to withdraw his present help from us, we shall be made a story and a byword through the world, we shall open the mouths of enemies to speak evil of the ways of God and all professors for Gods sake; we shall shame the faces of many of God’s worthy servants, and cause their prayers to be turned into curses upon us till we be consumed out of the good land whither we are going.” — John Winthrop 1630
Image by chrisjohnbeckett via Flickr
by Lesley Docksey
Writer, Dandelion Salad
England
September 2, 2013
There has been an epidemic of outrage in the United Kingdom over the last few days, most of it coming from the great and not so good. The original cause was the alleged chemical weapons attack in Syria. With no hard evidence as to what the attack involved and who was actually responsible, our leaders had no hesitation in blaming President Assad, and suddenly we were awash with demands for ‘intervention’, military of course, as if the West hadn’t been intervening from the start.
by Lesley Docksey
Writer, Dandelion Salad
August 21, 2013
Image by Push Europe via Flickr
‘Water, water everywhere,
Nor any drop to drink.’
— Samuel Taylor Coleridge: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
At long last Britain is discussing and objecting to fracking – or we would be if the general public had access to accurate information. As it is, Prime Minister David Cameron is going all out to promote a country-wide embrace of shale gas.
Image by Dandelion Salad via Flickr
by Lesley Docksey
Writer, Dandelion Salad
July 18, 2013
Climate change along with the disastrous effects it will have on the earth and humanity is being ignored by much of society. I differentiate between the earth and humanity because many people only relate to the problems that humans might suffer, not fully understanding that what damages the earth also damages us. During the 1992 UN Earth Summit in Rio, media headlines were screaming “We’ve only got 20 years to save the earth!” An environmentalist dryly pointed out, “No. The earth will survive. We have 20 years to save humanity.”
by Lesley Docksey
Writer, Dandelion Salad
June 22, 2013
Image by John Novotny via Flickr
Will the biotech companies ever give up on trying to sell Europe their genetically modified crops? Their latest PR man is the UK’s Minister for the Department of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), Owen Paterson. His website (very bland and uninformative apart from his list of engagements) says he is “a passionate supporter of localism, free enterprise and less interference in people’s lives”. But he also loudly supports Monsanto et al, and wants all of Europe to grow and eat GM foods. I would say that thoroughly destroys any localism, interferes in the most basic way with our lives, and any enterprise is freely handed to big corporations that already have far too much power over people.
Image by Noel Reynolds via Flickr
by Lesley Docksey
Writer, Dandelion Salad
June 20, 2013
Great Britain is a small island, no more that 600 miles on its longest north/south axis from John O’Groats in Scotland to Lands End in Cornwall. Yet it has the most diverse geology, layer after layer of it laid down over the millennia. In other countries one might travel for 200 miles or even much more before the scenery changes in any way. Here 20 miles will do it, and the most obvious sign is what the old houses are built of. Continue reading
Image by Martin Kalfatovic via Flickr
by Lesley Docksey
Writer, Dandelion Salad
June 14, 2013
For some years an international campaign has been gradually building – ICAN, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons. The goal is a treaty banning nuclear weapons, a Convention such as the Landmine Convention and the Cluster Munitions Convention. It will follow the same process, and requires enough nations, supported by their citizens, to sign up to it, bring it into being and then to ratify it. Once ratified, the development, possession and use of nuclear weapons becomes illegal. The beauty of this approach is that it sidesteps the bogged-down Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in which states that have undertaken to get rid of their remaining nuclear weapons endlessly argue about ‘process’ with the aim of hanging on to their horrifically destructive toys.
by Lesley Docksey
Writer, Dandelion Salad
March 12, 2013
Image by tedeytan via Flickr
Being born ‘with a silver spoon in your mouth’ means that you start with an advantage that others don’t have: parents with money, property, influence, business connections and so on, connections that can last for generations. A silver spoon that appeared recently was the exceedingly generous compensation paid to British slave owners when the UK abolished slavery in 1833, though not one penny went to the freed slaves. The ancestors of many well-connected people (including David Cameron) benefited. Continue reading
Image by chrisjohnbeckett via Flickr
by Lesley Docksey
Guest Writer
Dandelion Salad
England
March 1, 2013
Why is it, just when you think the British Government can sink no lower and visit no more embarrassment and shame upon the country they are supposedly there to represent, that within a week or less one of the Ministers will open his mouth or put pen to paper and demonstrate just how arrogant and useless they are? Arrogant because they believe that whatever they say will be accepted as the final word on the subject; useless because they apparently can’t foresee how their statements will be received.
by Lesley Docksey
Guest Writer
Dandelion Salad
Jan. 27, 2013
Image by Sam Dredge via Flickr
With the ‘global war on terror’ dominating the headlines, when Western interests headed by Western security and armed forces are sweeping across vast swathes of the Middle East and North Africa, people are losing sight of a threat that will affect everyone, rich or poor, regardless of their religion, status or nationality. So caught up in its Crusade – and what else can we honestly call it when the countries we are invading, attacking with drones or interfering with behind the scenes are all entirely or partially Muslim – the West is blind to the crusade it should really be fighting, that of climate change and the destruction of the natural world upon which all humanity depends.
by Lesley Docksey
Guest Writer
Dandelion Salad
Jan. 2, 2013
Image by Dandelion Salad via Flickr
What is this life if, full of care, we have no time to stand and stare.
–William Henry Davies
Each year that passes I become more despairing over the lack of action to contain climate change, a despair echoed by George Monbiot. This last year both the Earth Summit in June and the Doha Climate Change meeting in November were notable only for the reluctance yet again of those in power to take any real action. Continue reading
by Lesley Docksey
Guest Writer
Dandelion Salad
originally published on dissidentvoice.org, Dec. 2, 2012
Nov. 28, 2012
Image by Ray Janus @ 350.org via Flickr
While the great and the not so good were preparing to jet to Doha to disagree over what, if anything, they were going to do about climate change (and indigenous people everywhere wring their hands), and the British government was preparing to allow a possible 60% of the UK to be affected by shale gas exploration, Crisis Forum was presenting the last in a series of workshops on Climate Change and Violence. We tried to remain positive, but… To help prepare us the organiser, Dr Mark Levene, asked us to consider these deliberately provocative questions:
Continue reading
Dandelion Salad 